Dispersals

Lee does a masterful job of blending personal reflection with natural and political history, and her prose is crystalline . . . This deserves a wide audience

Publishers Weekly

A beautiful book about belonging—plant and human. A work that will make you look at the orange in your hand, the moss underfoot, the tea that you sip a little more closely. Lee turns her careful gaze to the easy stories we tell ourselves about foreign and native, and leaves us with a vision of the world simultaneously more nuanced and more precious

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of 'Starling Days'

Lee evokes a centuries-long history of border crossings — by people and by plants — to throw into question what it means to really belong, love, and protect, and what our collective future might hold on a planet forever evolving in the wake of trans-continental migration

Literary Hub

Dispersals is a beautifully written and complex book . . . [Lee] shows us with stunning prose, tenderness and precision the unexpected ways that we all connect and are connected by the plants around us

Amanda Thomson, author of ''Belonging: Natural Histories of Place, Identity and Home'

One of the most interesting and celebrated contemporary writers of nature, identity and place . . . her work deftly interweaves personal memoir and family history with botany, cultural criticism and first-hand observations of the natural world

The Berliner

Lee’s lyrical prose sprouts from a fertile ground of intensive research and intimate memories — memories that are by turns sharply vivid and pleasantly hazy with the distance of time . . . She moves seamlessly from seaweed to soybeans to citrus . . . Jessica J. Lee will make you stop and smell the weeds

The Cut