- Street:
- Village Books
- Additional:
- 1200 Eleventh Street
- City:
- Bellingham ,
- Province:
- Washington
- Postal Code:
- 98225
- Country:
- United States
A Hedgebrook North: Women Authoring Change series event
Prepare to be moved, perhaps undone, by this powerful narrative-verse memoir by a mother struggling with the reality of her son at war in Iraq. Anna Quindlen devoted an entire Newsweek column to The Warrior, which she called “heart-rending.” O, The Oprah Magazine devoted a two-page spread to these poems, which Gloria Steinem called “a lifeline across a deadly chasm for every reader.” “Even if you don’t have a son fighting in Iraq, even if you don’t read poetry, even if you think you are immune to the power of a mother’s lament—pick up this book and read it right away.” –Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics
After raising her son Ben as a single mother, Richey watched from home as he served two tours of duty in Iraq as a Green Beret—on missions so secret, he often had to remain incommunicado from everyone, including her. The Warrior is an urgent exploration of the daily feelings a mother endures while her child is away at war, and it addresses a family’s struggle to overcome ideological differences in the face of a greater cause—for although Richey does not support the war in Iraq, she knows she must accept the choices her son has made. The finely crafted, stringently beautiful and relentlessly heartfelt poems in The Warrior are both accessible and of a very high artistic order. The poems are born of necessity; they are for her a way of bridging the distance between herself and her son, of bearing witness to the act of waiting and to the life that her son was living with all of its dangers and mysteries.
Whether for or against the war in Iraq, read The Warrior for its piercing insight into a world we might not know, but a world that without question touches all of their lives. It will bring comfort to those who have waited for loved ones and are waiting now. Every soldier should have someone writing poems for them like these.
Frances Richey grew up in the South and after working almost 20 years in the business world, left to teach yoga and write. She is the author of one previous collection of poetry, The Burning Point, which won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize, and she lives in NYC.
This event is the first in Village Books’ new Hedgebrook North: Women Authoring Change series, co-sponsored by Hedgebrook, an internationally known women’s writing retreat on Whidbey Island. For more information on Hedgebrook, visit www.hedgebrook.org.
2012 Chuckanut Writers Conference
