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Even as she was searching for people who had wanted to live like a tree, a quest recorded in her book How I Became a Tree, Sumana Roy was simultaneously writing poems to imagine the opposite: How might it feel for plants to live social lives as humans? In V.I.P, ‘plant’ replaces ‘people’ to become Very Important Plant. In this new cosmology, leaves and fruits and roots are seen as perhaps they have never been before – whether flowers can be repaired or trees have insurance policies; the invisible scaffolding of water in onion and the jackfruit as the Buddha’s head, the papaya as Trojan horse and the ‘war-veteran fine fuzz’ of peaches, the ‘shape of ceremony’ of apples and the cosmopolitanism of the forest; how we want affection to be boneless and why the taste of light might be bitter; or whether God might be a vegetable…
