A01=Rachel Richardson
Author_Rachel Richardson
california wildfires
Category=DC
Category=WN
contemporary
environmentalism
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
female friendship
forthcoming
healing after trauma
motherhood
mothers
poet
wildfires
women writers
Product details
- ISBN 9781324134381
- Dimensions: 140 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 24 Nov 2026
- Publisher: WW Norton & Co
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
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.
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.
