Kingsolver's lyricism transforms settings, scenes, characters, and actions into patterns of imagery, indirectly appealing to her readers' senses. The imagery in her prose is as vivid as the imagery found in poetry. Kingsolver makes use of figurative language — language that is taken figuratively as well as literally — to write a lyrical novel.
In The Bean Trees, figurative language includes metaphors and similes. Metaphors compare two unlike things without using words of comparison (like or as). In the novel, for example, when Taylor and Turtle are nearing Tucson, it begins to hail and the roads are covered with ice. Traffic is slow, and Kingsolver describes the pace as being "about the speed of a government check." Another example of Kingsolver's use of metaphor, this time influenced by her feminist views, is a humorous Valentine's Day card that Taylor buys for her mother. The card compares a man's helpfulness around the house to that of a pipe wrench. Kingsolver also relies on her extensive background in biology to include natural history metaphors. She compares the "thick, muscly [wisteria] vines" as they come out of the ground to "the arms of this guy who'd delivered Mattie's new refrigerator by himself."
