Poetry. African American Studies. 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." An artful and sincere book, RIFT's images, rhythms, and ideas will captivate any reader.
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