This volume of poetry thoughtfully considers national and personal upheavals.

In her latest collection, Richardson includes pieces from her two chapbooks and a full-length collection, An Everyday Thing (2018), alongside new poems, some previously appearing in literary magazines. In the six sections of the work, the author documents her experiences with the ghosts of memory, beginning with her native steel-mill town of Youngstown, Ohio. The Rust Belt is rich ground for poets responding to the ambiguities of a lost industry: In Youngstown, “the sky was a leaden haze, / where the soot was called ‘pay dirt.’ ” The book’s sequence then follows a trajectory through political engagement on behalf of justice, the shootings at Kent State University, the teaching of children with speech difficulties, marriage and family, illness and death, and, finally, homecoming. Richardson’s graceful lines have a striking clarity and discipline. In “Fathers,” the speaker remembers her own absent father and a friend’s abusive one, writing that she “thought this must / be what fathers do. Leave your life / or push you from your body.” In the wake of such absence, daughters anticipate a return, “his pale hands reaching out for you,” seven words that create a haunting, indelible sense of the uncanny. In several poems, the author attends to the voiceless, especially those caught in systems or conditions not of their own making. “The photos speak for themselves,” says the judge in “Kent State Trial, 1975.” But they don’t: “The photos held their tongues.” Work, so often the subject here, suggests a way to transform the past, as in the concluding poem, “Lost.” Lost in the woods and at a dead end, the speaker backtracks, discovering “the intersection where I / went wrong”—the only way to choose a different path.

Compassionate, well-crafted poems that look unflinchingly at loss, grief, and the tides of history.

A debut poetry collection that vividly captures both the dreams and despair of blue-collar America.

The geographic inspiration for Richardson’s masterful book is the industrial heartland of Ohio. The collection is divided into two sections: “The Fire’s Edge,” which focuses predominantly on growing up in the Rust Belt in the mid-20th century, a time of financial instability and decay; and “Untying,” which takes a broader look at uncertainties that increase as one gets older. The first section contains a series of poems that detail the 1970 Kent State University shootings, in which National Guardsmen killed four university students, and their aftermath. By far the most haunting is “Randomness,” which imagines the early-morning ablutions of Sandra Scheuer, one of the students killed: “She slid from her bed on the morning of May 4, / chose the bright red blouse for the occasion / of the day of her death.” “Fainting” captures the feeling of wooziness during the event itself (“Heart / accelerated, free agent of pace and rhythm / beating against my chest wall, room tilting”) and goes on to note that “those lost / unconscious moments exist somewhere / in the cosmos, owed to me by the fact / I have not lived them.” In these claustrophobic, unstable industrial terrains, poems sometimes glimpse beautiful vistas, as in “Youngstown, Ohio 1952”: “the air lifted enough / for me to see the fevered orange flush / of the open hearth on the horizon.” Here, the powerful beauty of a sunset mirrors the infernal glow of the steelworkers’ toil. But Richardson’s painterly use of imagery is but one of her many skills; another is the manner in which poetry and music coexist within her work. In the second section’s “In the Cardiologist’s Office,” Procol Harum’s 1967 song “A Whiter Shade of Pale” filters through waiting-room speakers and wraps around recollections of a traffic accident: “my hands circling his chest turning cartwheels on the floor my head against his back bracing at the place where the car crushed his heart.” This collection will strike a chord with anyone who’s ever pondered the ephemerality of each moment.

A dazzling work by a deeply intuitive writer.