Sister Sorrow by Rachel Landrum Crumble

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

Reading Sister Sorrow one realizes that this is not just a book of loss, of grief or of anger at a mother’s suicide, and not just a book in which love lives on every page, but it is also, and underneath everything else a book about that place inside us where bafflement meets mystery: a strange place, sometimes frightening and sometimes filled with clear flowing water, birdsong and the deep joy of companionship. Through her poetry Rachel Landrum Crumble reconstructs the past and attempts to organize the random—ultimately completing a journey of acceptance and personal growth. I wake, after dreaming/ all night of wheelchairs: /place my feet on the cold floor,/ make my bed, and walk… Because this poet knows who she is and is secure in that, her poems are true. Each page encounters a moment where facts are prevalent, where passion and craft forge an unforgettable story. What remains is somehow essential.

These poems are beautifully made in a voice that one instinctively trusts.

–Mary Kay Rummel, Poet Laureate emerita of Ventura County, CA, Author of Nocturnes: Between Flesh and Stone

The task in Rachel Landrum Crumble’s lyrically heroic Sister Sorrow is to write against what Emily Dickinson called “heavenly hurt” as well as its earthly counterpart, and how wonderfully it succeeds! Indeed, as it moves through its sections from  mourning to wonder in a deft, masterful way it is as if we are following the pattern of a redemptive ode. Early on, for example,  she exclaims “my own pain shimmers like wind- / chimes,” — that complex metaphor and line break announcing not only the pain but the hope in the music of poetry itself. So, while “grief will live on in the rubble,” the triumph here is in discovering how, like the fireflies in “Luminous,” we have to “light the world from inside out.” I, for one, am fully enlightened by this wonderful and moving book.

–Richard Jackson, author of Broken Horizons and Where The Wind Comes From