In her latest book, Blue Atlas, newly released from Red Hen Press, award-winning Washington poet Susan Rich confronts and chronicles her world before, during and after an abortion she underwent as a young woman in the mid-1980s. The abortion provides a point from which Rich’s speaker measures her relative distance, in physical and emotional space and time, to whatever her ultimate truth might be — her true north.
At the same time, Rich recognizes that no truth is absolute and no destination final. Past, present and future exist within the 50 poems in this ambitious work, which weave through time and place as Rich continually orbits the traumatic event that she refers to in “Binocular Vision” as “my choiceless choice.”