Nancy Richardson

Going Home Nancy Richardson

We are so routinely betrayed by America's promises that we may forget our disillusion, our striving, and our still living hopes. This quiet, powerful collection helps us remember-both the history that is industrial and political and the particular history that accrues to a lifetime. The poems are testimonies to feelings that manage-and it is a hallmark of the poet's art-to be both stark and subtle, as they delve into grief that is manufactured daily by seemingly countless lies and into the truths that sustain a person and her poetry. There is a Whitman quality here-touch this book, and you touch the quiver of what deeply occurred.

Baron Wormser, Poet Laureate of Maine and Author of Songs from a Voice

The poems of Going Home are written with a journalist's eye, an educator's heart, an activist's gut, a poet's ear, and patience. "Work is taking something from it," Richardson ends the opening poem, and this taking is the poet's gift. In this collection, she asks," What do you give your time to?" We see her give it to the work that needs to be done-the futile campaign, the thankless task-whether it's getting out the vote in her hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, where "Votes float into errant flying digits;" "Recovering the bricks of disaster in redactions," while sorting through records of the Kent State shooting trials; working with and on behalf of children with autism, naming what needs to be named; or remembering tragic episodes that endow a life with history's longer life. Against the abuse of power-whether in the courtroom, the classroom, or the church-Richardson deploys the dramatic power of ordering, of the unanswerable question, of the found poem: "isn't death an everyday thing for everyone?"

Rebecca Starks, Author of Time is Always Now