Benjamin Banneker and Us
A family reunion gives way to an unforgettable genealogical quest as relatives reconnect across lines of color, culture, and time, putting the past into urgent conversation with the present.
A New Yorker Best Book of 2023
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Praise for Benjamin Banneker and Us
“Her excellent and thought-provoking book is on every level about unknowing rather than knowing — about pondering the mysteries of Banneker, who is often described as one of the first African American scientists, and the legacy of 11 generations of a multiracial American family that only now is coming into view.”
“a stunning meditation on race, identity, and achievement.”
“Webster has created an engrossing, multifaceted, profoundly thoughtful, and beautifully rendered inquiry that forms a clarifying lens on America’s ongoing struggles against racism and endemic injustice.”
"The conversations between Webster and her cousins are among the more compelling parts of the book, providing a platform for the cousins to share the implications of their ancestry as Black people."
– NPR
September
The poems in Rachel Webster’s debut collection September often address a fleeting moment. Like the month, the moment can be a single leaf falling or a season of life. Webster’s pastoral poems address personal physical change in the seasons of life, including childhood, love, motherhood, and death. Together they lead the reader through a lyrical landscape of conversation, meditation, and healing. The work of a poet sensitive to worlds external and internal, September speaks to the core of life and the simplicity of human events and the natural world around us.
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Praise for September
“Rachel’s voice is that of a seer, mystic, and ecstatic lover of existence who knows very clearly the intimacy of destruction and nonexistence. On the other hand, she manages to sound like a close friend simply pointing out the ravishing beauty that surrounds us. Hers is the voice of our inner friend. If this collection is any proof, she is on a path of ever-deepening power, insight, and craft. We’re blessed by these poems and by Rachel Webster’s presence in our time.”
– Li-Young Lee, author of Rose, City in Which I Love You and Behind My Eyes
“Webster’s resonant poems perceive with the astonishing clarity of a visionary remove, even as they inhabit feelingly a solid world honey-combed with interior being: ‘water-carved caves…inner rivers ambered by/lime’s radiant decay,//form maintained by its secret of space…’”
– Eleanor Wilner, author of Reversing the Spell: New and Selected Poems.
“September is an exciting first book that takes the insane and nonsensical experience of grief and gives it a celebratory language that is a joy to read.”
– Matthew Dickman, author of Mayakovsky’s Revolver
“Nuanced and caring poems that reach from the immediate and intimate to the timeless and universal."
– Donna Seaman, Booklist, starred review
Mary is a River
A Finalist for the 2014 National Poetry Series.
“Mary of Magdala—disciple, lover, and beloved—has been called many things. Here she is called a river, flowing into and alongside the great river of the God-man. As the swiftest stream carves the deepest canyon, her voice carves a landscape of intimate, fragile beauty. Rachel Jamison Webster has given us a mesmerizing collection of poems about love’s bliss, its rage against death, and its bewildered passage through and beyond it.”
—Barbara Newman, author of God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry, and Belief in the Middle Ages
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Praise for Mary is a River
“This book is so beautiful I don’t even know how it was made. It feels given.”
– Krisin LeMay, author of I Told My Soul to Sing: Finding God With Emily Dickinson
“Mary is a River is the third collection by Rachel Jamison Webster that I’ve read. What draws me to her work again and again is her uncanny ability to connect all people to each other, the universe to itself. In Webster’s work nothing is lost, nothing is futile. All energy, all efforts are intertwined through time and space. This interconnectivity challenges and comforts me, takes me out of my narrow view of the material world and into a unified, ordered space.”
– Amy Strauss Friedman, author of The Lost Positive
The Sea Came Up & Drowned
A book of erasure poems, mined from John McPhee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Annals of the Former World. The book covers a timeline stretching from pre-European contact to a dramatic, post-American future, exploring the social and ecological devastations of the Western Empire. The book is a meditation on the extractive economy and its costs of human erasure and climate upheaval. Webster explores the human-land relationship in evocative poems that combine history, love, and intimate life moments, alongside visionary collage illustrations.
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Praise for The Sea Came Up & Drowned
“Rachel Jamison Webster evokes the broken wholeness of the earth’s mantle of conscious beings—animal, vegetable, mineral—perishing in soil, water, and wind, through the folly of empire, human ignorance and illusion. The story of how Webster wove these sparse, powerful poems and their accompanying illustrations is as engaging as the poetry itself.”
—Alicia Bay Laurel, Author of Living on the Earth
“By imagining the human as geological and the geological as human, Webster warns that the human story of extraction has implications for the human future and the earth’s future.”
– Tracy Zeman, author of Empire.
The Endless Unbegun
Part fable, part portal, "The Endless Unbegun" moves through prose and poetry, the past and the present, the mystical and the carnal, to tell a love story through many lifetimes. The twenty-first-century romance of Jon and Marisol opens into the sixth-century friendship of Radegunde and Fortunatus, which opens into poems that speak intimately of connection—with others, with the future we engender, and with the Earth that sustains us. Here, poetry meets myth in timeless writing that recognizes and renews the soul.
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Praise for The Endless Unbegun
“The Endless Unbegun is a marked departure for Rachel Jamison Webster. It's a work located at the margins--the margins of present and past, of the lyrical and the narrative, of flesh and spirit, of the sacred and profane--and each page of this ambitious book is animated by the energy and imaginative daring that genuine departures require. In employing poetry to channel and entwine history and myth, Webster has fashioned an ecstatic text.”
– Stuart Dybek, author of Paper Lanterns: Love Stories
“My present was my past/ and my future was coming at me/ in dreams…Webster writes. “Forgetting, remembering,/ we only have the space between.” In this space, spirituality and human connections flourish. Love is both anchored and awash in the winds of history; it never dies but changes form, knitting itself into the fabric of time. These stories remind us that we carry on, that all matter endures.”
– Amy Danzer