My Poem with This Wailing in the Background

Christopher Kempf reviews Rachel Richardson’s “Smother” and Esther Lin’s “Cold Thief Place.”

By Christopher KempfMarch 11, 2025

• Poetry

“IT IS IMPOSSIBLE,” Eavan Boland used to say, one of the many hand-grenade generalizations she tendered as fact during her workshops, “to privatize a public event. The public event is ultimately owned by everyone.”

She meant, as I would come to understand, not that one should forswear public engagement in one’s writing, but that to articulate the poetic self in relation to “shared” or sociopolitical experience was to enter, as if across some unseen border, the fraught and precarious territory of ethics, to involve oneself in questions of scale and situation, for instance—or of ambit and argument, mode and movement—which opened both oneself and one’s work to ethical and aesthetic censure. Self-evident, perhaps, in an era of the poetry callout and cancellation, the notion that the discipline entailed its own ethical standards was itself a standard of the Boland workshop, where Stegner Fellows like Esther Lin and Rachel Richardson honed their work, as I tried to in those workshops, with one eye on a poem’s technique and another on its integrity.

In her own work, of course, Boland navigated precisely that territory she often warned about, moving deftly, in one poem, from an upstairs bedroom beside a child’s crib to the calico mills of County Kildare or, in another, from a grandmother’s eviction to Anglo-Irish land politics in the early 20th century.

Well-versed, then, in the trajectory from private to public, Lin and Richardson—who were Boland’s students from 2017 to 2019 and from 2004 to 2006, respectively—likewise imagine the lyric as a liaison between interior and exterior worlds, situating the self within contexts of immediate sociopolitical urgency. One notes Boland’s influence on their two new collections, to be sure, but both feel idiosyncratic and fresh, of the contemporary world in the striking way they bring 21st-century experience to the page, from ICE raids to air-quality indices. Though their subject matter differs, Lin’s Cold Thief Place and Richardson’s Smother achieve alike an ethical engagement with those forces—legal and extralegal, economic as well as ecological—that shape both self and society. They are not only bold in ambition, it seems to me, but also brilliant in execution, and stake out dramatic new terrain for the American “public poem.”

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The narrative arc that takes shape across Esther Lin’s impressive debut, Cold Thief Place, will be a familiar one for many readers, bending as it does from the exodus to the arrival of the multigenerational immigrant family, one of the most public of domestic experiences. Lin’s shaping of that arc, though, as she follows her parents’ flight from communist China to the United States, and as she meditates in particular on the underworld or twilight realm of the so-called “undocumented,” reveals a first-book writer already possessed of the graceful touch of the master, a writer skilled in the kind of elision and understatement that—as in the work of Marie Howe and Ellen Bryant Voigt, and Boland—allow the narrative structure itself to show with distinct definition, absent overwriting.

Slender on the page, the poems in Cold Thief Place exhibit, too, a lapidary spareness in style, their narratives rendered with clean lines and gestural observations. It is the book’s observational quality, along with Lin’s tactical eschewing of artifice and adornment, that allows her to examine the experience of the undocumented with fascinating, if discomfiting, immediacy.

In doing so, Lin ushers readers into what she calls, after Jean Rhys, a “cold thief place,” the diurnal logistics and clandestine networks of people and documents by which she and her family became first residents in and subsequently citizens of the United States.

Having suggested in a previous poem, for instance, that “to keep on living / in America I had to marry / a nice boy”—a legal-cum-economic arrangement, as she explains, between “petitioners” and “beneficiaries”—Lin reveals in “Done Right” how undocumented immigrants’ most intimate moments might be cut through with danger and despair:

Mist from the beneficiary’s
shower. Does she love
the petitioner?
She steps out, damp as a frog.
The petitioner’s throat
is parched. Will she
pour a glass? One
tumbler, crystal.
Ring of hard water.
White soap.
A note has been made.
A note has been made.

Here, what might have been a rare moment of privacy, as Lin’s speaker escapes temporarily from the exchange economy of a transactional marriage, becomes instead a moment of claustrophobic desperation, that “ring of hard water” evincing Lin’s characteristic understatement and close observation.

Similarly fraught logistical scenarios recur throughout Cold Thief Place: a driver’s license secured by “dealers” and handlers, visits from caseworkers, backroom encounters at border stations. Through these and other “cold thief places,” institutional as much as geographic, Lin maps the multiple forms of diminishment, marginalization, and hiddenness to which undocumented immigrants are subjected, especially women. “When the doctors said girl,” Lin writes, “she changed my name / from Samuel to Esther. Prophet to concubine. […] The name means / hidden one.”

Perhaps the most original and striking aspect of Cold Thief Place, though, is the way Lin juxtaposes the collection’s concern with documentation against her own work as a writer, so that her learning and eventual mastery of language reads not merely as cultural assimilation but as reappropriation and counterarticulation, a document, as it were, of the undocumented:

People who do not know about documents,
do not need them.

They have never needed them.
A person without documents
is the one who must bear them aloft.

Compelled by American authorities to “bear [her documents] aloft,” Lin bears aloft Cold Thief Place itself as a kind of testimony and triumph, an inherent and inherited ars poetica. As she does, she considers with keen attention the obligation of the public writer to her family:

should I say
you beat us
too
in the shower
in public
on the face
with boots
with a chair leg […]

but it’s verging
on melodrama
nice people
don’t suspend
their disbelief.

As here, the places and people of Cold Thief Place exist privately and publicly at the same time, Lin’s personal experience inseparable from its public articulation. The book, that is, tracks the power of legal and linguistic systems alike to shape the subjects they produce.

A Künstlerroman of cross-cultural and multigenerational scope, Lin’s debut has been anticipated by many—including me—for some time. To sit with Cold Thief Place is to appreciate why that has been the case; critically forceful yet never strident, deeply felt yet never self-indulgent, the book is an intimate document well deserving of wide public recognition.

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Rachel Richardson’s third collection, Smother, sets for itself the unenviable task of weighing private grief against public catastrophe, elegizing a dear friend as record-breaking wildfires sweep through the American West. Amid such devastation, Richardson asks, how might one measure the loss of a single life—of Nina, “your N, / soft center like a hammock / leading to the smaller n, the sigh”?

At the same time, turning from past friendship to the imperiled future her children will one day inherit, Richardson asks how one might preserve those intimate enjoyments in which, as W. H. Auden perceived, one “turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster.”

As she thinks through these questions, Richardson arrives at a hard-won ambivalence, defying our species’ collective doom by raising two young girls even as she gestures to the suspect ethics of heterosexual futurity. Richardson’s is an ethics of ironic juxtaposition, as when she explains that “the Caldor Fire surrounds the summer camp where I picked them up last week, dirt-streaked and smiling,” or when, in another summer camp poem, she monitors remotely the air quality in the Sierra Nevada:

        I upload again and again
        the little circles on the map
        representing their air—

                (my children in their tents—)

        cursing when red turns
        to purple, praying to the god
        I pray to, which is no god,

        which is the vast smoky sky,
        for orange, then yellow.

One gets a sense here of the subtlety in Richardson’s self-critique, as she implicates herself in those corporate and technological depredations responsible, in large part, for our ongoing climatological disaster. Hers is a nice Berkeley liberalism, she acknowledges, as vicious as it is virtuous; in Smother, Richardson is always “cross[ing] town to take [her] kids to circus class” or “driving them in crosstown traffic to the wildlife rescue,” always awaiting “air purifiers ordered with Prime.”

Equally impressive in its subtlety is Richardson’s penchant for literary allusion. In “The Houses Anchored on the Hillside,” about suburban encroachment on wildlife habitats, well-executed enjambment conjures Thomas Wyatt’s “Whoso List to Hunt,” itself a poem blurring the lines between human and animal. Surrounded by coyotes, a “woman’s hand gripped the leather handle // of the bag she carried—for to hold / is to wield, and it was a weight.” And here is Wyatt, famously: “There is written, her fair neck round about: / Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am, / And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.” Extravagantly archaic in his syntax, Wyatt anticipates Richardson in his siting of predation within an imperial context. In similar fashion, Stéphane Mallarmé’s ego-annihilating “L’Azur” becomes in Smother a reprieve from California’s smoke-filled skies; Richardson’s air is “an open blueness, / crisp, as if mouths had never / breathed into it, / only trees breathed out.” A kind of aesthetic extravagance, the invocation of literary history occasions for Richardson a meditation on Theodor Adorno’s old problem of what it means to create art out of catastrophe. “I’m monstrous too, though,” Richardson admits, “writing / my poem with this wailing in the background.”

Rather than resting at self-flagellation, Smother offers two strikingly opposed responses to climate crisis, each radical in its ethical imagination. On one hand, Richardson adopts a devil-may-care nonchalance, admitting ecological ruin as the acceptable cost of human life. One would ravage anything for one’s children, Richardson suggests—“what it kills, it kills.” On the other hand, acknowledging the hubris of such a response, Richardson imagines her own eventual annihilation-by-nature:

My skin here would become like the
manzanitas: I’d grow into

myself, I’d accept my trunk
like Daphne, I’d learn
to stretch in it, be peeled back

by flame. Smolder.

Implicit in such an apocalypse, however—at least as Richardson frames it—would be the loss of those moments in which the human species seems, however briefly, magnificent. If Boland could maintain that “the insistence on personal happiness in the face of public disorder is a bad-faith cop-out,” Richardson departs from her mentor in recuperating her own intimate joy:

My daughter,
unknower
of the telephone,
cups her
hand against
my ear, whispers
a sentence.

Turning, as I’ve suggested, from burn-it-down defiance to self-annihilation to an ambivalent archivism of domestic contentment, Richardson exposes the intricate interrelation of ethical frameworks, revealing at the same time Smother’s sweep and sophistication. As with Lin’s ambivalence toward her own documentary practice, Richardson holds opposed ideas in mind at the same time, embodying F. Scott Fitzgerald’s oft-cited definition of a “first-rate intelligence,” itself an updating of John Keats’s “negative capability.”

Just as Lin bears aloft Cold Thief Place as a document of family history, then, Richardson takes up her daughter’s whispered sentence—from which, as readers, we remain barred—as a kind of freighted ethical obligation, an inheritance, an impossible indulgence. In her 1995 essay “Subject Matters,” Eavan Boland speaks to that obligation; the public poem, Boland writes, “is not the report of a privileged witness [but] a continuing action which revises […] the perceived relation of power between an inner and outer world.” In Cold Thief Place and Smother, inheritors of a tradition of domestic yet public poetry that Boland helped to define, those relations of power are restlessly—and wondrously—recalibrated.