Chelsea Rathburn
Chelsea Rathburn is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Broken Houses and Still Life with Mother and Knife, both published by Louisiana State University Press. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets, and her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Atlantic, The Southern Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and many other journals. Raised in Miami, she now lives in Macon and teaches at Mercer University. Since 2019, she has served as the Poet Laureate of Georgia.
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Chelsea Rathburn
Broken Houses: Poems
In Broken Houses, her fourth collection of poetry, Chelsea Rathburn offers a powerful meditation on home and the foundations—both physical and metaphorical, stable and unstable—that shape us. Drawing upon historical records, contemporary art, family photographs, and memory, Rathburn explores the settlement of the city of Miami, as well as her father’s placement in a California foster home, to tell larger stories of dispossession and erasure.
At a time when the American Dream seems all the more unreachable, the poems in Broken Houses urge us to hold tight to one another and build connections where we can.
