Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection I Have This Thing for Flowers

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn’s I Have This Thing for Flowers connect our humanity to flora in surprising and magnificent ways in one of the year’s most powerful essay collections. Booklist wrote of the book: “The temporality of flowers is used as a metaphor for the transient manifestations of love in its many forms. Sawchyn scrutinizes her past relationships as both a scientist and an art critic, identifying recurring themes and similarities. Her memoir-in-essays acts as a commentary on how writers and other artists are driven to create a cohesive narrative, wrestling chaos into something that illuminates the human condition . . . . This confessional paean to flowers succeeds as a…