Keena Boling

Consider Some Flowers Keena Boling

Consider Some Flowers presents several dualities: writer and glass artisan, death and life, reality and make-believe. This collection focuses on the narrator's grief after the death of her beloved and finding various ways to mourn.

As the narrative continues, the narrator finds comfort in creating assorted plant species out of glass. The concept of preserving life in intricate detail through glass flowers fascinates the narrator and allows her to explore the degrees of loss by questioning the objectives of art.

Just as the narrator experiences the five stages of grief, each flower goes through stages to be completed--from studying the anatomy of each living plant to admiring the finished piece. Reliving the events before death and the artistic process become intertwined as time goes on. These glass plants are able to live forever unlike their real counterparts. Sustaining a life, even one as simple as a plant, allows the narrator to feel a sense of control. As the roots of her glass flowers sometimes end abruptly so does life. But life can't exist without death and as the narrator exclaims, surrounded by her glass garden, she misses the beauty in wilting. In the fragility of glass, the narrator comes to understand the fragility of life and her own grief.

This collection recounts Boling's own experience with grief while drawing inspiration from the famed "Glass Flowers," officially the Ware Collection of Blaschka Glass Models of Plants, on permanent exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History and their creators, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka.