Collaborators’ Q&A:  Artist David Bernardy: I enjoy how this poem offers a kind of secret history of the thistle plant…. I like how this secret history coupled with the strength, resilience, and tenderness one must find at a place like Thistle Farms. Poet Jennifer Jean: I was surprised that David was able to visually reflect my archaic references and verbal tics—by including the older seeming photo-triptych, two evidently older map segments, and what seems to be a weathered drawing of a thistle (possibly from a weathered herbarium?).

Poet Jennifer Jean’s debut collection is  The Fool (Big Table 2013). She teaches Free2Write poetry workshops to sex-trafficking survivors. Artist David Bernardy is an artist, a writer and a dad. He likes lost things, old things, and dogs.