Herbal Reverie by Max Power

Launch event:
- June 13, 2026
- 2-5 PM
- 2954 W 4th Ave

UNIT/PITT is pleased to announce the publication of Herbal Reverie, a book of poetry by Max Power. Designed by Aaron Friend-Lettner, and featuring photography by Julie Pasila and edited by Ryley O’Byrne, Herbal Reverie explores the interspecies relationship between plants and people as an alternative method for processing and witnessing.

The launch took place at U/P’s gallery and garden (2954 West 4th Ave, Vancouver) on June 13 from 2-5pm, featuring a live reading by Max Power of selected poems from the book, a presentation by Aaron Friend-Lettner on the book design and production process, and a live vocal performance by artist em postl responding to the publication’s themes. The event also included a Host Nation welcome by Audrey Siegl, acknowledging the unceded Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories on which this project is taking place.

Herbal Reverie is a limited-edition arts publication project by writer, artist, and herbalist Max Power, designed by award-winning book maker Aaron Friend-Lettner. The book includes twenty original poems by Power, original photographs by Julie Pasila, and is edited by Ryley O’Bryne, exploring how building relationships with plants can deepen connections to ourselves, to community, and to the places we come from. The project adopts various forms of storytelling—words, images, and collaborative learning spaces—to inspire deep connection to the profound shared existence and presence of plants. The work is decolonial in its approach, highlighting the importance of connection with the natural world in light of today’s overlapping existential crises related to climate, war, food security, and shifting political ideologies.

This book is co-published by UNIT/PITT and Dædu. We are grateful for the support of the Ananda Foundation for bringing this publication and vision to life.

Artist Bios

Max Power (they/them) comes from a lineage of earth tenders, teachers, and bards. They have worked with plants for over two decades in multiple roles, including apprenticeships, running a flower/seed farm, serving as a CSA coordinator, and, most recently, working as a community herbalist.

Max attended Toronto Metropolitan University and graduated in 2012 with a BFA (Honours) in photography. In 2017, they earned a BEd from Simon Fraser University. Since then, they have worked as a teacher-librarian with SD39 and, currently, SD46. In both school communities, they started multiple school garden projects, where they share and teach their passion for plants and growing food.

After years of working with print-based media, Max has shifted their art practice to encompass the written word. Their work is best described as Queer Plant Poetics, as can be seen in their forthcoming publication, Herbal Reverie.

Max’s work is deeply informed by ancestral connections, old folk magic, and the plants themselves. They are at the beginning of their poetry practice, and much of their writing training has come through mentorships with Liz Migliorelli of Sister Spinster and Sarah Holmes of Blue Otter School. In 2025, Max graduated from the Vermont School of Integrative Herbalism’s Family and Community Herbalist Training Program. As a guest on shíshálh and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw land, Max is deeply grateful to the land keepers—past, present, and future—of Ch’kw’elhp, where they reside and tend a medicinal herb garden.

Since earning a BFA in Photography from Toronto Metropolitan University in 2013, Canada-based artist Aaron Friend Lettner has committed himself to an interdisciplinary practice that enfolds photography, award-winning book design, immersive exhibitions and installations, community-engaged programs, public art commissions, performance, residencies, instruction and professional mentorships – most recently with acclaimed typographer Robert Bringhurst.

Aaron is a polymath in many respects, as his record makes clear. Underpinning the poetic nature of his work is both a technical and intellectual rigour that lends substance to its voice. There is something fundamentally existential in Aaron’s search for meaning and connection through the projects he undertakes, which gracefully blend artforms in order to explore different notions of memory, specifically its relationship to personhood and place. This work is informed by a reverential orientation towards beauty and mystery as animating forces in the world, and their fingerprints can be found on all he does.

Aaron received the inaugural Burtynsky Grant for his photobook ‘Doorways’ in 2016 and a Canadian national book design award from the Alcuin Society in 2021 for ‘anglepoise.’ His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions across Canada, Japan and Germany. Aaron founded the publishing imprint Dædu in 2018, whose books are held in several special collections, including the Deutsches Buch- und Schriftmuseum in Leipzig. Its recent publication – ‘The Seqret Book’ – placed first in Interactive Design at the 2023 Indigo Awards, an international panel.

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