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September: Poems
The poems in Rachel Webster’s debut collection September often address a fleeting moment. Like the month, the moment can be a single leaf falling or a season of life. Webster’s pastoral poems address personal physical change in the seasons of life, including childhood, love, motherhood, and death. Together they lead the reader through a lyrical landscape of conversation, meditation, and healing. The work of a poet sensitive to worlds external and internal, September speaks to the core of life and the simplicity of human events and the natural world around us.
- GenresPoetry
104 pages, Paperback
First published August 31, 2013
3 people are currently reading
60 people want to read
About the author
Rachel Jamison Webster
8 books53 followersRachel Jamison Webster (M.F.A. Warren Wilson) is the author of the full-length collection of poetry, September: Poems (Northwestern University Press, 2013) and a hybrid of poetry and prose, titled “The Endless Unbegun” (Twelve Winters Press, forthcoming in 2015) as well as two chapbooks, The Blue Grotto (Dancing Girl Press 2009) and “Leaving Phoebe” (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming in 2015).
Webster has published poetry and essays in many journals and anthologies such as Poetry, The Southern Review, The Paris Review and Blackbird. She edits an online anthology of international poetry, UniVerse of Poetry, which features poets from every nation in the world and creates programs to widen poetry's audience, through which she curated and produced "The Gift," a series of radio essays about poetry for Chicago Public Radio.
Rachel has received an Emerging Artist Award from the Poetry Foundation and the Poetry Center of Chicago, an Academy of American Poets Young Poets Prize, and an American Association of University Women Award, the latter for her implementation of writing workshops for homeless youth in Portland, Oregon. From 1998-2001 she worked closely with Chicago's First Lady Maggie Daley to establish literary arts apprenticeships for thousands of city teens. In this capacity, she edited two anthologies of writing by young people, "Alchemy" (2001) and “Paper Atrium” (2004). She teaches advanced and beginning classes in poetry and creative non-fiction at Northwestern University, in Chicago.
Webster has published poetry and essays in many journals and anthologies such as Poetry, The Southern Review, The Paris Review and Blackbird. She edits an online anthology of international poetry, UniVerse of Poetry, which features poets from every nation in the world and creates programs to widen poetry's audience, through which she curated and produced "The Gift," a series of radio essays about poetry for Chicago Public Radio.
Rachel has received an Emerging Artist Award from the Poetry Foundation and the Poetry Center of Chicago, an Academy of American Poets Young Poets Prize, and an American Association of University Women Award, the latter for her implementation of writing workshops for homeless youth in Portland, Oregon. From 1998-2001 she worked closely with Chicago's First Lady Maggie Daley to establish literary arts apprenticeships for thousands of city teens. In this capacity, she edited two anthologies of writing by young people, "Alchemy" (2001) and “Paper Atrium” (2004). She teaches advanced and beginning classes in poetry and creative non-fiction at Northwestern University, in Chicago.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 14, 2015
The beginning of this book - parts 1 and 2 - were amazing. It was hard for me to put the book down. But when I got to part 3 I was underwhelmed and confused. Could have been a mistake on my part, maybe I couldn't understand what she was saying - but she lost me.
Would still definitely recommend this book, though. Rachel Webster's style is beautiful and flowing.
Would still definitely recommend this book, though. Rachel Webster's style is beautiful and flowing.
April 20, 2013
Beautiful sorrow, beautiful love. I'm very thankful to have read this book.
August 3, 2025
Often She’d Drop Into Fathomless
Always I thought mother looking out the window
meant elsewhere meant longing
for self-wisps rippled in glass
and in the grass across the tracks beyond that.
I didn’t know until you mother could be
me, looking out the window could be
this, third-person glancing it: joy
so whole she only hems it like a guest.
Always I thought mother looking out the window
meant elsewhere meant longing
for self-wisps rippled in glass
and in the grass across the tracks beyond that.
I didn’t know until you mother could be
me, looking out the window could be
this, third-person glancing it: joy
so whole she only hems it like a guest.
October 16, 2018
I like the cover. This was interesting.
September 20, 2013
Too many "prose poems", with very little use of image. Left me cold.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews