A companion to the film
The Book
The poems that started it all
Before there was a film, there were poems - and questions that needed somewhere to live.
The Poetry Behind the Journey
The Unrooted Bloom began on the page, in poems written across years of becoming - a woman, a mother, a daughter, and a person trying to make sense of the many worlds she inhabited. The collection moves through race, love, grief, motherhood, family, and ancestry, giving language to the contradictions of being both rooted and unrooted, known and misunderstood, held and searching. Those poems would eventually open the door to a much larger journey - and to the film that followed.
“Amber Allen-Peirson’s work, as you will soon discover, is astonishing, as brazenly truthful as one can be, and yet human, humble and even charming at the same time.”
— Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird