A Song of Flowers - Ni Xochitl Ni Kuikatl

An ode to nature, poetry and design. In a vertigo between an art book and a book of discovery, this work is a voyage into the poetic land of Nahuatl, an exploration of the literature of the Song of Flowers.

It is complemented by an essay by Alberto Manguel on song and flowers in world literature. Accessible and demanding, the book is made-to-measure with natural, low-resource-consumption fibers derived from wine-growing.

In Nahuatl, a language spoken in central Mexico since the 7th century, poetry is designated by a pair of metaphors, Ni Xochitl Ni Kuikatl, “flower, song”. This term describes the poetry as “an ephemeral moment of beauty and truth, symbolized by the flower and the song. It is an elevation, an outpouring that is expressed. The flower reaches for the sky and the song soars into the air.”

At the heart of this still too little-known literary continent, poetry is not that activity of writing. It unfolds above all through song, and is intimately linked to the surrounding vegetation and flowers. Words and their associations are to be imagined as the poem as a bouquet of words to be sung to the sky.

JBE Books, 2024
Hardcover, 120pp
Printed on Favini Crush Corn and Crush Grape stock 
360 x 190mm