Bookseller: The Arctic Plants of New York City combines personal letters, poetry, prose essay, scholarly research, botanical exploration, and artistic investigation, and ranges from the Doctrine of Signatures to the sleep of plants, and from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Muir on mental travel to Giacomo Leopardi and Charles Baudelaire on the necessity of illusion for art and life.

Interspersed throughout the book are a number of two-page spreads that focus on a single plant, such as Common Mugwort, with a mounted botanical specimen of that plant surrounded by texts drawn from earlier writers on botany and set in verse, creating a field of word-objects interacting with plant-objects. The letters that open the book lead into a prose essay that touches on the souls of plants, their use in medicine and as spurs to mental travel, their transience, their migrations, their meaning. A bibliography lists the most essential works from the author's research and the book concludes with a reproduction of the index from Nicholas Polunin's Circumpolar Arctic Flora (1959), in which the author has marked in red pen the 88 Arctic plants that occur in New York City.