Why this Berkeley poet is training to fight wildfires

"Poet Rachel Richardson's new anthology, Smother, includes descriptions of the California wildfires of 2017-2022, parenting during the pandemic, the day the sky turned orange and the death of a close friend like her, a mother of two from cancer at the age of 39. In this, her third book, Richardson brings readers along in her interrogations of grief and loss, motherhood and womanhood that waft through the poems, pointing out what we might have missed through all the smoke."

"I upload again and again / the little circles on the map/representing their air / (my children in their tents ) / cursing when red turns/ to purple, praying to the god / I pray to, which is no god,/ which is the vast smoky sky,/ for orange, then yellow. Let me / be so bold as to pray/for green."

"As a consequence of the fires, Richardson recently added a unique entry to her bio: wildfire firefighter. Last year she began training as a crew level firefighter on track for a FFT2 certification, whose duties include fire suppression and fuel management. A Berkeley native, Richardson returned in 2015 and now lives a half-mile from where she grew up in Thousand Oaks."

Smother includes descriptions of the California wildfires from 2017 to 2022, parenting during the pandemic, the day the sky turned orange, and the death of a close friend and mother of two from cancer at 39. Poems interrogate grief, loss, motherhood, and womanhood, tracing moments obscured by smoke and ending with appreciation for surviving relationships and worlds. Several poems reference Berkeley, including Shut Down's farewells to teenage babysitters and Tamarack Fire's portrayal of helplessness while daughters were at Tuolumne Camp. Richardson trained as a crew-level wildfire firefighter on track for FFT2 certification and co-founded Left Margin LIT in Berkeley.

Read at www.berkeleyside.org