W. W. Norton
128 pages
February 18, 2025
In this searching, defiant collection, award-winning poet Rachel Richardson takes up the existential losses of climate change and insists on the work of survival.
How should we raise our children in, and for, a world that is burning? Rachel Richardson’s third collection, Smother, interrogates this impossible question. The poet, raising young daughters and grieving the death of a mother friend, documents a string of record-breaking fires across the California landscape and the rage, sorrow, and detachment that follow amidst the pervasive smoke. Environmental and physical predation―on the earth and on the female body―weave through the book in layers.
But these are not poems of giving up. The poems in Smother gather accomplices in grief and mothering, seek out guides and girlfriends, remember the dead, keep watch at the firebreaks, and plant new trees on the burn scars. From lyric forms to moments of prose and documentary collage, these poems sing their song of resistance made from the music that is available to us now.
“Within that vast
triangle, land that appears
to be hanging only by a flimsy hinge
to the continent, the burn scars
having leveled the grasses, having pushed
the elk elsewhere up the ragged edge
for reeds, the hearts of some downed trees
still smolder. This is what I go for. To walk inside it,
to know what remains of the kingdom.”
―from “The Map Is Not The Territory”
Rachel Richardson is the author of two other poetry collections, Copperhead and Hundred-Year Wave. She is the cofounder of Left Margin LIT and a winner of the Hopwood Award, as well as a former Stegner and NEA Fellow. She lives in Berkeley, California.