Jessica J. Lee’s Dispersals is a meditation on migration, memory, and ecology that foregrounds the entanglement of human and more-than-human forms of dispersal. Moving between her family’s history of displacement across Taiwan, Canada, and the UK, and the drifting pathways of seeds, spores, and plants, Lee weaves together an intimate memoir with natural history to show how dispersal is both biological and cultural, material and emotional. Plants that travel through wind, water, and animals become metaphors and companions for the migrations of people, carrying stories of survival, belonging, and loss. Rather than framing migration as rupture alone, the book emphasizes the relational webs that emerge through scattering: seeds germinate in foreign soils, families make fragile homes across borders, and histories root themselves in unexpected places. In tracing these interwoven trajectories, Dispersals highlights how human lives are inseparable from ecological processes, inviting us to see migration not as isolated movement but as an entangled unfolding across landscapes, species, and generations.

— SG

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