Smother: Poems

by 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.


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.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Hardcover

Published February 18, 2025

Reviews

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

The smoke and haze of California wildfires fuels this graceful collection of poems from Berkeley poet Rachel Richardson. In it Richardson writes through what it means to be a mother, love, and find community and connection amid climate catastrophe when the future feels both dangerous and inevitable. Beautiful and timely.

[Jolie]

I wonder if Rachel Richardson's daughter has a birthday near to mine. Sometimes I forget it hasn't always smelled like soot.

[Mya Matteo · Rating 5 out of 5]

“My mother was the clouded-over night / a moon swims through.”

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Organized around California wildfires, motherhood and the death of a friend, Smother joins the growing list of contemporary poetry volumes confronting the existential, political and psychological mess we've collectively created:

The people huddled
looking into their private, blue-lit screens,
trying to think of what to type
that might communicate
this leaden grief, the totality
of the body's aloneness
in which we somehow lived
together--and we believed aht we believed
about who was at fault" (p. 26)

The poems that jumped at me: Fishbowl; Zeitgeist; Domestic; The 'I Want' Song; "Smoke Cento."

[Janet Van · Rating 5 out of 5]

To be honest, I had a bad experience with a poetry professor in college and so don’t find myself gravitating towards poetry books. My husband got me this one and I have to say - once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down. Rachel Richardson has completely blown my mind and made me rethink what poetry is. It’s beautiful, touching, and so accessible. I absolutely loved it and am now rereading.

[Seth Arnopole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful collection of poems about motherhood, family life, loss, etc with the backdrop of extensive wildfires and a global pandemic.

[Penny · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely collection of poems mostly having to do with motherhood in the deepest sense of the word.

[nat · Rating 4 out of 5]

4⭐️