Sleep, Creep, Leap

Full of lyrical, humorous, and botanical short essays, SLEEP, CREEP, LEAP will leave you inspired to sit a while with your plants, noticing how the smallest events become the largest—and how the garden brings us down to earth so that we can come home to our lives.

Peeling off sheets of skin from a sunburned back. Visiting five nurseries and spending $1,000 in an afternoon. Raising 200 monarch butterflies. Feeding grasshoppers to a spider. Hearing the wings of geese thirty feet overhead at sunset. How one piece of mulch can make all the difference. These are the stories of Benjamin Vogt’s 1,500 foot native prairie garden over the course of three years. After a small patio garden at his last home teases him into avid tinkering, the blank canvas of his new marriage and quarter acre lot prove to be a rich place full of delight, anguish, and rapture in all four seasons. Full of lyrical, humorous, and botanical short essays, SLEEP, CREEP, LEAP will leave you inspired to sit a while with your plants, noticing how the smallest events become the largest—and how the garden brings us down to earth so that we can come home to our lives.

Benjamin Vogt is the author of the poetry collection Afterimage (SFA Press), as well as two chapbooks. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an M.F.A. from The Ohio State University. Benjamin’s nonfiction and poetry have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and have appeared in over fifty journals, newspapers, anthologies, and textbooks, including American Life in Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, Diagram, Hayden’s Ferry Review, ISLE, Orion, Puerto del Sol, Sou’wester, Subtropics, The Sun, and Verse Daily. He is also the author of the blog The Deep Middle where he rants about writing and his native prairie garden. He lives in Lincoln, Nebraska with his wife.