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”