Rift Format: Paperback

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.”

FORREST HAMER, a former winner of the Beatrice Hawley Award and the Northern California Book Award, is an Oakland, California psychologist and affiliate member of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute and Society. His poetry appears in many journals, and he has received fellowships from the California Arts Council and Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference. He has taught on the poetry faculty of the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshops. Rift is his third collection of poems, following Call & Response (1995) and Middle Ear (2000).