Ars Botanica

April 17, 2017
Part epistolary memoir and part emotive taxonomy of significant flora and fauna, the primary endeavor of this book, Taranto’s debut, is transformation: to wring from grief the shape and substance of art. In a series of letters to his and his former partner’s unborn child, Taranto details love’s earliest stages, disrupted by one of life’s most difficult decisions. It’s clear from the outset that this is a couple bound for heartbreak, but Taranto nonetheless lingers—therapeutically, perhaps—on their “blissed out era,” replete with the many intimacies of a lover’s universe, shared and special: “She sang me ‘Unchained Melody’ and I sat down in the middle of the road, feeling especially small under a canopy of our shining galaxy.” Still, despite the address to their child, the memoir reads more like a love letter to Taranto’s then partner, as a testament to the life they shared before the abortion, the future that could have been, and—at least to Taranto—the pain that brought them closer before it undid them: “What is love if not the refuge we find in another when confronted with life’s suffering?” A study in letting go, even the excess of happy moments recounted in grief serve as a reminder of grief’s essential paradox: “The more I feel your presence, the more acute your absence is; the more of you I’ve got, the more of you I’ve lost.”

June 15, 2017
An unusual narrative of loss that becomes both a meditation on the Earth and a benediction for one who won't be around to enjoy it.Taranto's first book is a poetic memoir steeped in beginnings and endings. The narrative is composed of a series of letters to an unborn child, whom the author addresses as Catalpa, interspersed with illustrated botanical definitions, poems, observations, song lyrics, and bursts of dialogue. This assorted correspondence with a lost child is primarily an explanation (and perhaps an apology) of how the child's conception began but was ultimately terminated. Taranto writes of how he and his girlfriend met, each helping the other work through their troubles. She loved him despite his alopecia, a medical condition that left him hairless; he stuck by her following a near-fatal bicycle accident that not only broke several bones, but, during the hospital visit, led to the realization that she was pregnant. Taranto memorializes a difficult period in his life, made all the more painful because the abortion was not inevitable. The basic reason was that the couple didn't really know each other that well, an explanation that seemed to suit her more than him. The book is not an anti-abortion tract; Taranto did not interfere with her decision and offered solace and support. But by its very nature, the story is haunted by lost possibilities. At one point, the author utters a prayer that God take him instead of the baby: "Let me be a father only in memory if she can be a mother in this life. Amen." The prayer went unanswered; the closest Taranto would get to fully realizing the fatherhood of Catalpa is through an act of memory and imagination, for which this one-way epistolary emotional scrapbook will have to suffice. An uneven, often heart-wrenching attempt at resolving a personal struggle through art but also a sobering consideration of how things happen--or don't.

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