Rift: Poems

Rift, the third collection from poet and psychologist Forrest Hamer, engages hauntingly with separations and reconciliations that are both personal and socio-historical. Hamer draws on his American experience-including his youth in Goldsboro, North Carolina-and his African heritage-including the tragic conflicts between Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda-to investigate memories, stories, and the way in which a poem is a hopeful body. Yusef Kumunyakaa has described Hamer’s poems as calls into our modern wilderness that demand heartfelt responses, and Al Young compares them to a Robert Johnson blues or a Thelonious Monk ballad; [they] linger in the blood long after they enter the inner eye and ear.