In California, we now live in a forever fire season. Once limited to hot, dry autumns, massive conflagrations now occur year-round. When this possibility becomes an active threat, it produces a paranoia: keeping a go bag packed, the gas tank full, one’s phone charged, and only half sleeping so as not to miss an evacuation order. As the devastating Los Angeles fires—and others before them, too—show, this oppression is no longer visited solely on those living in the wilderness-urban interface. It also weighs on those in cities and developed areas once thought unlikely to burn.
Rachel Richardson’s new poetry collection, Smother, addresses this changed world and the stifling fear it brings. Published, coincidentally, on the heels of the L.A. fires, the book celebrates motherhood as a rebuke to this suffocation. The poet’s defiance is directed not just at flame and smoke but also at those who reveal their misogyny by picking apart maternity—a woman’s decision to have a baby, how she raises the child, how her self-identity changes as her young one grows up. Richardson’s reproof arises from what appears, on the surface, to be despair at the multiple large wildfires that ravaged Northern and Central California during the roughly seven years she spent writing these poems. She uses this backdrop to build an interrogation of fire and motherhood that begins with the title itself. Smother is simply mother with an s in front. Without the s, the word suggests love and nurturing; with the s, it’s a verb that kills.
Richardson’s posture is revealed by the book’s epigraph: “I automatically reject any poem with the word ‘mother’ in it,” which was uttered by the late poet J.D. McClatchy, who was once the editor of the Yale Review and president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. By choosing McClatchy’s statement to open her book, Richardson is throwing down the gauntlet.
The collection’s first work, “Creek Fire,” begins, “The dark comes in on my girl’s tenth birthday. / Fire bearing crow feathers—no, ash” and concludes with “everyone blinking, looking around, / phones lifted to the horizon.” This braiding together of maternal worry, danger, and hopelessness shows Richardson pushing back against McClatchy and capturing the peril posed by a 2020 blaze that would burn for nearly four months. The holding aloft of phones—seeking more bars of service—to receive warnings, air quality information, and communications from loved ones echoes the dependence on these mobile devices Daniel Gumbiner depicts in his novel Fire in the Canyon. Like Gumbiner, Richardson asks us to reconsider our dependence on technology when primeval forces like family and community are under attack by fire and climate change. In “The ‘I Want’ Song,” for instance, she writes, “I just want them to stop emailing. All of them. You. The bots,” and goes on to talk about deleting her profile in favor of standing inside the fog.
The presence of poet Nina Riggs looms large over and within many of these poems: “Nina in the undergrowth. Nina / in the coffee’s steam.” Riggs was a close friend of Richardson’s who died from cancer in 2017. Her acclaimed memoir, The Bright Hour, describes her life as a mother diagnosed with an incurable illness. “Questions,” which is dedicated to Riggs, begins with a note of cynicism, “If there’s one true thing, it’s that / Google will make money / off us no matter what,” but goes on to express Richardson’s disconsolation about that which is unanswerable, “where are you now.” In “Nina Redux,” we see “the thread that binds me to those who are / also putting a child to bed” as the kinship that Richardson feels with Riggs—and with all mothers—from raising kids in calamitous circumstances, be they an orange, smoke-filled sky or the more dire, metastatic triple-negative breast cancer.
This kindred spirit connects a series of “Girl Friend” poems included in the book’s final two sections (the collection is divided into six parts). Their placement serves as an insistent reminder of the power of friendship in the face of adversity. “Girl Friend Poem: Lyrae,” a version of which first appeared in Alta Journal in 2022, expresses pathos over “the fire-carved / landscape” and hope: “Tell me how it smells / in fall. Tell me about the rain.”
To read Smother is also to be welcomed into a community of writers. For instance, “Despite” bears the dedication “after Hikmet/O’Hara/Reeves/Vuong/Rader/Wright” and arose from Richardson’s correspondence with poet friends. Or, as she explains in her Notes, “Mother Cento” borrows lines from Saeed Jones, Louise Glück, and others; in “Smoke Cento,” she swaps “smoke” for other nouns in lines from iconic poets like Maya Angelou, Robert Hass, and Emily Dickinson. Off the page, Richardson’s interrogation of fire through verse calls to mind Obi Kaufmann’s examination of it with his watercolor illustrations in The State of Fire: Why California Burns and Manjula Martin’s narrative response to living through the LNU Lightning Complex wildfires in The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History.
The collection’s final poem answers a question posed at the outset of Smother: How can anyone possibly dare to raise a child in this rapidly warming world? In “After Fire,” Richardson writes of how “kids cradled baby trees / in their arms” as they go about replanting in a burn area. Having faith in these seedlings is an act of hope and resilience, a nod that these children—seedlings of the human variety—will one day inhabit this damaged planet as adults. Until then, their caregivers can only do their best:
We stood over them, mothers
over young, gods for our brief moment,
remembering the engineer had said
it’s reasonable to hope
that a few might make it.•
Blaise Zerega is Alta Journal's editorial director. His journalism has appeared in Conde Nast Portfolio (deputy editor and part of founding team), WIRED (managing editor), the New Yorker, Forbes, and other publications. Additionally, he was the editor of Red Herring magazine, once the bible of Silicon Valley. Throughout his career, he has helped lead teams small and large to numerous honors, including multiple National Magazine Awards. He attended the United States Military Academy and New York University and received a Michener Fellowship for fiction from the Texas Center for Writers.
