"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."
