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The Fires’s Edge by Nancy Richardson is a chapbook that contains poems about the economic hardships resulting from de-industrialization in the rust-belt of Ohio, the social upheaval, and the efforts to alter the results of dislocation through campaigns and protest. Interlaced with social justice poems are remembrances of the people and places the author knew during that time. The book is dedicated to the authors sister, Galen Keller Lewis, researcher for the Kent State Trial. The book begins with a poem, Randomness, that describes the shooting of student Sandra Scheuer who was walking to class and was shot from 400 feet away wearing a red shirt her Mother had sent her for her birthday. Other poems on this subject include a description of the fear involved in attending a Jefferson Airplane concert after the shootings and the treatment of students during the civil trial. The book’s poems move to describe the door to door campaigning that was designed to elect a President who believed in democratic principals in 2004. The poems are particularly timely when one considers the recent campaigns in Ohio which have reflected the same issues that were resonant through the 1970s 80s and 90s. But the book also delivers striking descriptions and elegies of the people close to the author in the decades from the 1970s to the present. These evolve into a series of poems at the end of the book that are philosophical in nature. The book avoids the strident language that is often present in political poetry and in the choice of images and language underlines what we have lost and what we may hold dear to us in the on-going attempt to forge a life of conscience.
