[02/18/25] Richardson, Rachel: Smother (HB)

W. W. Norton & Company, hardcover

Publication Date: February 18, 2025

Publisher Marketing:

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 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.