Sister Sorrow

This courageous collection, the work of decades, is a travelogue; Rachel Landrum Crumble sets out toward the terrain of the other “to find/ my own way in the dark—/transform the unspeakable/ into words,” unflinchingly journeying into family history, incuding her mother’s illness and suicide. The healing that she moves into deepens her questions rather than neatly resolving them, and we’re invited into those depths.  A peripatetic thinker, Crumble doesn’t linger in one place for long; these intelligent, percepitve lyric narratives depict her world travels and international correspondence; her explorations of memory, language, and the dream life in various local contexts; and the nuances of her life in an interracial family in 21st century America.  Together, the poems are “a kind of singing…: the voice a luminous/ beam in an amorphous fearful country, a way of asserting/ I am here in the face of overwhelming evidence//otherwise.”

–Claire Bateman, Wonders of the Invisible World (forthcoming), Scape, and others