Promotional photo of Chelsea Rathburn. By Marley Sledge
Poet Chelsea Rathburn presented poetry from her collection “Still Life with Mother and Knife” Oct. 20 at the Carmichael Library.
Professor Asheley Wurzbacher introduced Rathburn at the event: “Dark femininity, as we might call it, is one of my personal favorite genres, and this book is a stellar contribution to that genre, probing the corners and of its speaker’s mind, exposing and owning her forbidden feelings and the forbidden feelings of the women who came before her.”
Rathburn read a variety of poems from her collection, and she explained that a major part of her poems was the relationship between mother and child and the psychology attributed to parenting. In her poems, she references media that relates to these ideas such as “Medea,” “The Berenstain Bears” and works from the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim to connect media with how mothers feel.
Rathburn previously spoke at the university in 2007 for a reading of her first book, “It wasn’t my first reading, but it feels that way,” she said. “I feel like a completely different person.”
“It’s been many years since Chelsea visited UM, and in the meantime, her latest book made a big splash in the poetry world. We were excited to welcome her back,” said Wurzbacher.
Since her previous reading, Rathburn has become the poet laureate for Georgia. “A poet laureate has this larger role of kind of being an ambassador for poetry, an advocate for poetry. If I can, through my poems, show people who are in marginalized positions, offer them a way to speak about their own experiences, I think that’s really empowering,” she said.
Bo Ferguson, a student who attended the event, said, “Her writing about generational trauma, storytelling about family and different depictions of human emotions really resonated with me as a writer.”
While the library likely won’t have Rathburn back for some time, it will host Tiphanie Yanique Feb. 2 for “an event very similar to Chelsea’s,” said Wurzbacher.
