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 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. “Within that vast triangle, land that appears to be hanging only by a flimsy hinge to the continent, the burn scars having leveled the grasses, having pushed the elk elsewhere up the ragged edge for reeds, the hearts of some downed trees still smolder. This is what I go for. To walk inside it, to know what remains of the kingdom.” —from “The Map Is Not The Territory”Issue Fifty-Two: A Conversation with Rachel Richardson Rachel Richardson is the author of three books of poetry, Smother (W. W. Norton & Co., 2025), Hundred-Year Wave (Carnegie Mellon, 2016), and Copperhead . Start Close In by David Whyte - Cara Gilger Ministries The whole time I was reading the book I kept thinking of the poem Start Close In by the poet and philosopher David Whyte. The opening line begins “start in . Smother: Poems (Hardcover) - Book Culture The poet, raising young daughters and grieving the death of a mother friend, documents a string of record-breaking fires across the California . Smother by Rachel Richardson | Penguin Random House Canada The poems in Smother gather accomplices in grief and mothering, seek out guides and girlfriends, remember. Keep Reading. Hardcover. 25.99. Select Title. Default Title. Variants. Default . Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Brian Turner – an unpublished poem . smothering most of the land from Wedderburn to Naseby . Poetry Shelf Monday Poem: Brian Turner – an unpublished poem and a new book.