RACHEL RICHARDSON
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.
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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.
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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.
W. W. NORTON & CO.
FEBRUARY 2025
Throughout the collection, fire, smoke and air flecked with ash become metaphors and characters as Richardson searches for resilience, defiance, and ultimately, hope.
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Alexis Madrigal, KQED Forum
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Richardson’s Smother [is] not only bold in ambition… but also brilliant in execution, and stake[s] out dramatic new terrain for the American 'public poem.' Richardson exposes the intricate interrelation of ethical frameworks, revealing at the same time Smother’s sweep and sophistication.
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Christopher Kempf, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Smother contends with… forms of grief and documents Richardson’s own struggle to find resilience in light of it.
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Erin Wong, High Country News
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To read Smother is … to be welcomed into a community of writers.
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Blaise Zerega, Alta Journal
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How harrowing, how moving, how oddly comforting to read these casually masterful poems. No matter how great the fear, this poet finds the courage to make poetry within, and out of, the great perils of our time. Richardson keeps speaking, and breathing, in that necessary and singular record, poetry.
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Matthew Zapruder, author of Story of a Poem and I Love Hearing Your Dreams
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These poems were made at the nexus where the difficult, often thankless, faith-heavy job of artist meets the difficult, often thankless, faith-heavy job of mother: Rachel Richardson, with full heart, soul, and mind, bears witness as the world—literally and figuratively—burns around her and her children. Without the luxury of nihilism, she resists looking away, makes hope from scratch, and sings. Smother is a guide, a dare, a prayer, and a miracle.
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Carrie Fountain, author of I’m Not Missing
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Rachel Richardson’s Smother stares down death, wildfires, a pandemic, and never once flinches. In wanting to 'stand inside the fog . . . [a]nd then to become the fog,' Richardson’s enveloping, and defiant, voice rolls across these pages with authority. In a world on fire and dying of thirst, this book will revive you and make you want to believe in hope again.
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Tomás Q. Morín, author of Machete