This collection is part of the 2025 Ghost City Press Summer Micro-Chapbook Series. All donations made for this title will go directly to the author.

Praise for Thigmonasty

“Thigmonasty, a term referring to a plant's response to touch, is thickly laid with surprises of ecology and connection. The author states "I dream in green" and indeed that seems so true, as she has one hand in the tradition of The Wild Iris where plants speak and scream, and another holding the heartstrung calligrammes of Apollinaire when she says, "I too tried to slumber through hungers / tried for patience in the absence of light." Training her eye not just on the natural world, but our broken human one as well, she relates that "hurt people sow the vines in the world." To dive into a moment of clarity and brilliance is to read the encapsulation that is Elizabeth Levinson's Thigmonasty.”

— Sandra Marchetti, author of Diorama

“The ten poems in Elizabeth Levinson’s chapbook, Thigmonasty, explore the ways in which humans, like other living creatures, act and react out of our own needs. The venus flytrap doesn’t decide to close its leaves around the fly, but responds to the fly’s touch and its own hunger. The speaker in the first poem titled “Thigmonasty” is tired of explaining why she hasn’t had children, but nonetheless explains that she imagines “a mother as always hungry, and a daughter as always just out of reach.” Hunger is a constant: in the next “Thigmonasty,” intimacy is defined as hunger, and the worms in another poem wake in the spring, hungry for the winterkill that they clear away so trillium, trout lilies and skunk cabbage can send up new growth. These and other echoes make us understand that we are part of the interdependent web of all existence. If we can’t actually hear the tomatoes’ clicks and pops of distress, we can imagine them—or this poet, also a biology teacher, can imagine them for us.”

—Susanna Lang, author of Like This