Magnolia or Redbud / 
Flowers for Laura Lee Burroughs
Dominic J. Jaeckle

With collage-works 
by Lucy Sante, 
& an afterword 
by David Keenan

Tenement Press / John Cassavetes 2
978-1-7393851-5-6 / 188pp / £17.50.

In the late 1930s, The Coca-Cola Company aimed to spearhead a campaign to better establish their product as a household staple and enrapture the middle-class homemaker’s market. A Trojan horse, the resulting promotion was run through the distribution of a ¢10 mail-order publication via Good Housekeeping on flower arrangement. Three illustrated editions, authored by St. Louis resident Laura Lee Burroughs, that would explore the practice of domestic and decorative horticulture as a means of sitting a bottle side-by-side with a bouquet: Flower Arranging: A Fascinating Hobby (Volume I and II) and Homes & Flowers: Refreshing Arrangements.





In 1940, the first of Burroughs’ works was offered to the public to a thunderous reception. More than a million and a half copies were printed to meet the degree of demand, and a second and third volume would follow in 1941 and 1942. Following the first outdoor wall advertisement for Coca-Cola—a hand painted sign Cartersville, Georgia, 1894—the replacement of the spring-sealed Hutchinson bottle with the signature hobble-skirt design of 1915, and the company’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations, 1935, the campaign cemented Coca-Cola’s market centrality and enflamed its suburban appeal.
        Mother of author William S. Burroughs, Laura Lee’s work sits as in poetic counterpoint to her son’s subsequent experiments with collage and cut-up—a formal flower arrangement of his own—and the poems collected in Magnolia or Redbud mimic the Burroughs brand of appropriation and textual re-combination by borrowing words and phrases pooled exclusively from Laura Lee’s three publications for Coca-Cola as a basis from which to essay an afterwork out of the family habit. 





*        *        *


You set the table for dinner and
—joining the ranks of the so-called
modern flowers
and water-loving animals—
        know that your interest needs
break the line

Needs make up for other kinds of deficiency

So, you leave

You search the garden for sunken things

For magnolia or redbud
        or a second piece of fruit —

for treasured and numbered heirlooms
and conversations that’ll adorn the room

Like severed ends in vinegar
        —deep water
or four feet of snow

[...]


*       *        *

Magnolia or Redbud is a beguiling, intoxicating mystery garden. In its hothouse alcoves, groves and bosquets, figures and figurations merge into shadowy projections that flit between domestic and psychic scenes. Like cut flowers, Jaeckle’s poems sit in a medium that both nurtures and traps them, formally thwarting their speaker’s quest for secrets and centres. What to do with the floral impulse to locate a centre, when the centre is understood to be a trojan horse filled with market forces, and the alienated variegations of desire? Jaeckle demonstrates how the cut-up’s disruption is also its irrigation, suspending these poems in quiet menace and beauty.
        —Daisy Lafarge

Dominic Jaeckle’s strange homage—is it really?—to William S. Burroughs’s mother Laura Lee takes the form of poetic assemblages that are invariably funnier and more subversive than the language of their anodyne source material would suggest. But this beautifully composed volume also goes beyond the more familiar uses of the cut-up, fashioning an unpredictable array of gifts through its trance-like modalities: These perishable arrangements / are the needle that holds our colder climates together.
       —David Grubbs

My mother returning to me is one of the primal images of my life. Added to all this, I could not help marvelling, is what booksellers call a sort of brogue. These are all part and parcel of this precious book, which go to make up the sum of its treasure to me ...
        —David Keenan, from his             
        Afterword, ‘Redbud, or Her 
        First Voyage’