As an award-winning poet, certified wildland firefighter, parent and co-founder of Left Margin Lit, one could say Berkeley resident Rachel Richardson wears a lot of hats. The author’s latest poetry collection, “Smother” ($26, W.W. Norton) hit bookshop shelves recently, so we took the opportunity to hear more about her work. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Smother is such an evocative word. How did you decide on it as your title?
A: The book is about smoke and motherhood primarily as its two subjects. Once I realized smother is a portmanteau of the two subjects, it seemed inevitable as a title. But I also like the tongue-in-cheek aggressiveness of it, because it sets a tone for the whole book that lets you know that this isn’t going to be a demure book. People often assume poetry books will be beautiful, full of lament or awe, and this book intends to be a little more gritty and in the real world.
The epigraph to the book is an annoying and dismissive comment by an editor at a major magazine that says he’s completely uninterested in poems about mothers or poems with the word mother in them. I’m also using the title to gesture in immediate defiance of that idea: There’s going to be a lot of the word ‘mother’ in this book.
Q: Tell me more about the poem “Smother,” and the smoke metaphor you use.
A: That poem is my play on the idea of the smoke as the idealized and unattainable mother. There’s an unattainable and damaging — and also limiting — idea of motherhood that we’re told to aspire to, and it is impossible in a real experience of being a human mother. Similarly, smoke can be everywhere but invisible; this dangerous thing that’s in our midst, and you can’t really get away from it — like you can’t get away from the patriarchy. I started thinking about things that annoyed me about what I was told about motherhood, and I replaced all the mothers with smoke as the character. That poem let me get out a lot of my frustrations and make fun of some of those ideas.
Q: I saw a few different themes in the book: motherhood, climate — specifically the Northern California experience of wildfires — and friendship. How did all of those fit together for you within the collection?
A: As I was writing this, one of my closest friends died, and so I started writing elegy poems to her. She was 39 when she died, and I was feeling devastated at her loss. I started writing to her, and in the process of writing those poems, all of these other societal elements kept coming in, like the smoke from all of our fires, and the distance that I felt from my friend after death, and from other people, by technological means. Then, COVID happened, which exacerbated all of those things and brought it to a head. That felt so isolating and demoralizing to me that I started making more active efforts to find and hold on to other women and value those friendships, because we are mortal, and we are far away from each other a lot of the time. I started writing love poems to my female friends in the latter half of this book, and that ended up being my answer to some of the losses I write about.
“Smother” is a new poetry collection by Berkeley poet Rachel Richardson ($26, W. W. Norton). (Courtesy W. W. Norton)
Q: Are there Bay Area-specific moments or experiences locals should look out for in your book?
A: I mention my kids in 2020 going to the same school that Kamala Harris integrated. Some squirrels made a little nest in my backyard, and we found in their building materials part of a Warriors flag. Two of the poems deal with the Caldor fire and its aftermath. The City of Berkeley owns Echo Lake and Tuolumne Camp in the wilderness (near South Lake Tahoe and Yosemite, respectively). The Tuolumne camp burned down in the 2013 Rim Fire and the Echo Lake camp was threatened by the Caldor Fire, which burned right up to the edge of the camp. That started to feel symbolic because these are our public estates, things owned by all of us, and generations of Bay Area and Berkeley kids have grown up in these spaces.
Q: That’s right, your last poem talks about replanting trees to help restore Tuolumne Camp. What do you hope readers take away from your book?
A: That poem ends with a tempered hope. You’ve planted these trees, and hopefully they’ll grow. Hopefully they’ll live in their new spots, and will grow tall enough, and we won’t have another fire here, so that in a generation or two, they can give back this family camp to the next generation of kids at Berkeley’s Tuolumne Camp. But it’s tempered hope, right? Because the engineer who was telling us how to plant the trees said, “One in 10 might make it.” I thought that was really depressing. But she said it in this hopeful way, and the more I thought about that, and sat with it for this poem, the more I thought that it is actually hopeful. You do more, with the hope that you’ve done enough that some will make it. There were multiple tree plantings, and people planted enough so that if even just one-tenth made it, we’d have a good forest. But the amount of effort is not lost on me, and I think that that probably is what you come away with at the end: That the effort to replace it and come back from this is not going to be small, but it’s a good idea to be hopeful about it. At the camp, there are all these little trees that we now get to go back to every year. They were a foot when we planted them, and now they’re nine feet. It’s exciting. I think the hope is justified, but effort is also required.
Q: Other thoughts to share?
A: This book is very much about community. I run a literary arts center with my husband called Left Margin Lit, which is a co-working space for writers. This is a single-authored book, but I wrote these poems in a more communal way than I’ve ever written before. That’s another source of hope and optimism for me — that there are a lot of people who love the arts here, and we can do this stuff together.
‘CREEK FIRE’
The dark comes in on my girl’s tenth birthday.
Fire bearing crow feathers—no, ash.
It comes with its big breath,
sun without light.
Cold morning
in the surrounding counties,
everyone blinking, looking around,
phones lifted to the horizon.
— “Excerpted from Smother: Poems. Copyright (c) 2025 by Rachel Richardson. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.”
Richardson will be participating in the following Bay Area Book Festival events on June 1:
12:15-1 p.m., a panel discussion called “Our Beautiful, Burning World” at the Marsh Theater, 2120 Allston Way, Berkeley
1:30-2:35, a poetry reading called “Women, Cyborgs, Revolutionary Petunias, and Other Creatures” at Kittredge Avenue at Harold Way in Berkeley.
Her book, “Smother” ($26, W.W. Norton) is available now.
