In poems both dark and playful, wondering and shrewd, Jennifer Richter brings her reader the world we truly inhabit: where everyone is in danger, where awe still thrives, where we can laugh even in the face of our own mortality, where everything and everyone is worth saving. \'The Underworld Also Swallows Sons,. \'[M]y son used to / sleep on me like a bunny on my belly, \' she writes, and those of us who know the particular pain of looking back on such tenderness, from a frightening present tense, clench our fists in empathy.
Charles Francis Richter-he of the Richter scale, and a poet-becomes a comrade in namesake Jennifer Richter\'s own harrowing attempts to accompany her son as he navigates a serious, persistent depression. -Bruce Weigl, author of Among Elms, in Ambush Dear Future teems with the cadence of panic, with the anticipatory anxiety of mothering children who are growing toward departure, and departing, while navigating a global pandemic, a globe rattled by literal and figurative earthquakes.
What endures for me is a quality of voice, that because of its natural beauty and its honesty, convinces the reader to enter the poems, where you will be safe.
Even this late in the human picture, she shows us that it is still possible to tell the truth about ourselves and to find beauty there.
Also present throughout is an astute reckoning of what lies at the heart of what being human means in the face of a poetic consideration.
That alone is a remarkable accomplishment.
The poet\'s sense of music is fine, and beautifully honed to the demands of American English, and I admire the variations on form throughout, especially the way the poet never allows the sentence to be what drives the poems but always the line. -From the Introduction by Felicia Zamora, Author of I Always Carry My Bones There\'s so much I like about this book that I hardly know where to begin.
These poems slide on a tightrope of moments compounded by imagery, ideation, and a slickness of language to portal us through space and time.
Each poem becomes its own magnitude of scale-its own pulsating seismologic wave of language-that breaks loose for us to experience.
In Dear Future, we see the everyday quaked open to expose the seams of life\'s uncertainty.
Her dynamic, unpredictable lines will delight with an irreverent and yet classically honed muscularity, even as the breath-taking scope of her subject matter will have each reader looking up from the book with a new way of seeing.
In poems both dark and playful, wondering and shrewd, Jennifer Richter brings her reader the world we truly inhabit: where everyone is in danger, where awe still thrives, where we can laugh even in the face of our own mortality, where everything and everyone is worth saving
