September

In Rachel Jamison Websters collection, September, recognizable subjects of  childbirth, motherhood, love and illness are transmuted into shimmering, elemental poems that reveal the music in the everyday, the dream in the life.    Just as September the season contains both high summer and its end, September the book yields poems that are chilled by loss yet rich in relationship—with humans and with the living earth itself.  “We too are a species,” Webster writes, “We too could know that as joy,” restoring us to our place amid the cycles and reminding us to wonder.  September is an abundant, luminous book by one of our most exciting young poets.

Rachel Jamison Webster (M.F.A. Warren Wilson) has published poetry and essays in print and online journals such as Poetry, The Southern Review, Redivider, Perihelion and Blackbird. She is currently sending out two poetry manuscripts for publication and enjoying the release of a chapbook, The Blue Grotto (Dancing Girl Press 2009). She edits an online anthology of international poetry, UniVerse of Poetry, which aims to widen poetry's audience and celebrate poets from every nation in the world, regardless of territory. Rachel is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Young Poets Prize and an American Association of University Women Award, the latter for her implementation of writing workshops for homeless youth in Portland, Oregon. From 1998-2001 she worked closely with Chicago's First Lady Maggie Daley to establish literary arts apprenticeships for city teens. In this capacity, she edited two anthologies of writing by young people, Alchemy (2001) and Paper Atrium (2004).