Poems that travel with a sense of urgency, bearing witness to precarious beauty, fleeting joy and the unfinished work required to survive.  The poems in this collection are located in many places including Italy, Russia, Hawaii, Florida, France, Texas, Minnesota and elsewhere. These different places are roots of the same tree that stands in the midst of a threatened and still beautiful earth. Through multiple locations, White explores how we might continue to live inside this vanishing with all the tools that have always been at our disposal: wonder, grief, hope and joy. The poems are meditations on this perilous moment in time and the demands that this moment places on anyone to stay curious and grateful even in the midst of our inability to change course or self-correct with a view toward the greater interconnectedness of all things. “J.P. White is a maker of dazzling metaphors and great phrases, constantly tweaking the language to make it new, shifting perspectives that cause readers to do a double-take on the world. He is both sensualist and metaphysician, asking the large questions in tightly controlled sentences, then answering them in lush imagery from human or natural worlds. These are wisdom-poems and fables that seem to come from another world, even as their astonishing imagery and incidents root firmly in this one: “No one now remembers when the sun/last scorched the back of their neck,/or when the tree shadows became the oldest of friends./Can’t find this city?/It could be just over there… beneath the sea grape, banyan and Benjamin fig.”” —Neil Shepard, editor of Plant-Human Quarterly  “There is a resonant and essential humanity in the poems of A Tree Becomes a Room . J.P. White’s poems give us a factual, first-hand appraisal of the human condition within an original and engaging imagination. A deep embrace of the world is balanced by irony, humor, and a sure sense of craft. Line to line the poems deliver fresh and unique takes on experience that expand our understanding of ourselves. This is an exceptional book.” —Christopher Buckley, editor of Salt “These are poems that move through the world, by land and water, taking us along in their wake. We’re right there picking loquats on the Italian coast, eating rabbit in Lourmarin, then somehow crossing “the salt distance” off Maui to look into the eyes of an old sea turtle. All the while, plumbing the waters of the psyche for what can be saved in a world that is both exquisite and unraveling. These poems make us believe that, just maybe, “Paradise is already here/ on the other side of elegy.” ― Danusha Lemeris J.P. White is the author of five books of poems and a novel, Every Boat Turns South. He has published essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews and poetry in many places including The Nation, The New Republic, The Gettysburg Review, Agni Review, Catamaran, APR, Salamander, Catamaran, North American Review, Shenandoah, The Georgia Review, Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, Water-Stone, The New York Times, Willow Springs, Crazyhorse, Peripheries, and Poetry (Chicago). Whiskey & Hard Water, a second novel, is forthcoming in 2024 from Regal House Publishing. He is the editor-at-large for Plant-Human Quarterly. Excerpts Dream of a Loquat Somewhere in the upper curl of the Italian coast, I am leaning over a rampart to pick a darker shade of orange gold loquat. It’s a long way down to the sea. I reach for a simple truth: Some fruit is worth a fall. This one, sweet and tart at the same time. This one, out on a high branch with a view of the harbor and the anchovy boats that have just returned. I tell myself I am so close, it should be mine to pick. I am old by now with my arms outstretched and my fingers grasping. It seems all I can do is hold this moment forever.   Smoke After the tumor had been cut from his throat and the radiation had started to cheat his swallow, he told me how in the long middle of a winter night in Ward C, he got up craving a smoke even though he no longer smoked and he walked down a hall with his IV pole to a fire escape so he could stand outside and pretend he had gone there to draw on a cigarette and once there it started to snow and at first he didn’t see the other man who had come there for the same reason with his IV pole, but then through the expanding steam of breath, it became clear my friend was not alone. He was not startled but instead started talking with the other would-be smoker as if this sudden gathering was a normal outing for both of them. The other man said he was dying of lung cancer and my friend said he’d had his last rites read three times and maybe he was already dead but the fact had not yet sunk in. The two men stood on a fire escape in St. Paul, Minnesota and shared something in that unlit place and I picture them now wondering if they met again after they were gone for by the end of their winter talk during a snow fall, they swore they would talk soon and often. Can We Please