There’s this Andrea Gibson quote you may have come across in light of the poet’s passing this summer: “When nothing softens the grief, may grief soften me.”
In a sense, the task that author John T. Price takes up in his new piece of hybrid literature published by Ice Cube Press, Goethe’s Oak: A Holocaust Story, is to guide his audience to be softened by the universal and harsh realities of the individual disasters that make up the broader societal trauma of genocide.
Goethe’s Oak is a relatively high-concept work. Written from the perspective of a historic tree found and lost at the site of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, Price ruminates on what it means to be in community with a larger ecosystem, with humans and with disaster.
The book is driven by a metaphor that Price creates around the biological phenomenon of trees supporting one another in their environment. But as the metaphor moved through the piece, it felt slightly clunky. Additionally, the relationship of care that Price is trying to explore between trees creates an unexplored opportunity regarding gender and the burden of care — even as they exist in nature. Admittedly, that is a rabbit hole that could significantly reorient the text.
Still, there is a lot that Price does with enviable craft throughout the book. He forces the reader to confront the ways in which nature bears witness to the very best and worst of humanity — thereby calling the reader to think about environmental justice not merely through the “standard” lens of existential climate disaster but also through the lens of cultural disaster.
Further, the book itself is set up in a way that welcomes readers who may not have a lot of experience with poetry/hybrid literature. By breaking up every page (and, functionally, the stanzas) with a page adorned only with a leaf illustration, the reader is forced to slow down and notice the things the page breaks are communicating — the passage of time, the weight of the oak’s emotion and more.
By the end of the text, readers of Goethe’s Oak will have experienced, alongside the historic tree at the center of the story, a part of the Holocaust they almost certainly never heard of before. As a result, they are asked to consider that genocides exist in individual vignettes that, when looked at with the frame of history, are too often lost in favor of broad, scoping narratives.
Price softened the way in which I understand and feel the weight of the Holocaust — not because he diminished the tragedy at hand, but because he took our collective grief and put it at a scale that is more tangible. To do so is, no doubt, an accomplishment that is nothing short of a gift.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2025 issue.
