top of page

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.

W. W. NORTON & CO.

FEBRUARY 2025

Rachel Richardson’s Smother stares down death, wildfires, a pandemic, and never once flinches. In wanting to 'stand inside the fog . . . [a]nd then to become the fog,' Richardson’s enveloping, and defiant, voice rolls across these pages with authority. In a world on fire and dying of thirst, this book will revive you and make you want to believe in hope again.

  Tomás Q. Morín, author of Machete

 

 

© 2025 by Rachel Richardson

bottom of page