Frances Richey

Poet and author of THE WARRIOR: A Mother's Story of a Son at War

Photo of Frances Richey

Biography

Frances Richey was born in Williamson, West Virginia in the heart of the coal fields in 1950. After graduating from the University of Kentucky, she worked in the business industry for nearly two decades. She has one child, Ben, whom she raised as a single mother since he was two years old.

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Frances Richey was born in Williamson, West Virginia in the heart of the coal fields in 1950. After graduating from the University of Kentucky, she worked in the business industry for nearly two decades. She has one child, Ben, whom she raised as a single mother since he was two years old.

When Ben was in high school, Richey realized she needed a new pursuit that would provide a deeper sense of meaning in her life than her corporate job and that would fill the void that would surely come when Ben left home for college. So, while continuing her nine-to-five job, she began volunteering at a hospice in New York City, teaching yoga to patients who were often in the last months or days of their lives. Each visit with a patient brought Richey closer to the reality of her mortality, and she soon started writing poems about her experience there. Before long, she realized that she could change her life in a fundamental way and spend the rest of it doing work she loved: teaching yoga and writing.

Her first collection, THE BURNING POINT, published in March 2004, won the White Pin Poetry Prize and was nominated for the Pushcart. Poems from her new collection THE WARRIOR: A Mother’s Story of a Son at War, to be published in April 2008, have appeared in a two-page spread in O, The Oprah Magazine, Nicholas Kristoff’s New York Times column and the local PBS show New York Voices.

KILL SCHOOL

That was the summer he rappelled
down mountains on rope

that from a distance looked thin
as the dragline of a spider,

barely visible, the tension
he descended

into the made-up
state of Pineland

with soldiers from his class.
They started with a rabbit,

and since my son was the only one
who’d never hunted,

he went first. He described it:
moonlight, the softness

of fur, another pulse
against his chest.

The trainer showed him
how to rock the rabbit

like a baby in his arms,
faster and faster,

until every sinew surrendered
and he smashed its head into a tree.

They make a little squeaking sound,
he said. They cry.

He drove as he told me:
You said you wanted to know.

I didn’t ask how he felt.
Maybe I should have,

but I was biting
off the skin from my lips,

looking out
beyond the glittering line

of traffic flying
past us in the dark.

Photo by Michael Fisher
 
Speaking Topics
  • The Warrior: A Mother’s Story of a Son at War
  • Poetry and Healing: Reading and Writing Poetry in Difficult Times
  • Single Parenting
  • Yoga and Writing
  • Changing Careers in Mid-Life

Featured Book

Featured book's cover THE WARRIOR: A Mother's Story of a Son at War "War and propoganda generalize. Love and poetry specify. In the specific ways this poet-mother refuses to lose touch with a warrior son, there is a lifeline across a deadly chasm for every reader."—Gloria Steinem Buy Books now!
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