University Professors Press is excited to announce the release of Trotting the Race of Time by Rich Furman. Dr. Furman is Professor of Social Work at the University of Washington, Tacoma, and a leading researcher in poetry therapy, including publishing articles on existential psychology and poetry therapy.
About Trotting Race of Time
Rich Furman’s third collection of poetry, Trotting Race of Time, interrogates the metaphor of revolution through haunting and imagistic lyric and narrative poems. This collection is both ethnography and autoethnography, equal parts coming-of-age tale and social document–distinctly voice poems that rip at the border between internal and external tumult. The poems are situated during the 1980s in Central America, a geography ignited by war and revolution, and caught between the covert interventions of Russia and the United States that characterized the final battles of the Cold War.
This collection of early work echoes influences as diverse as Isabell Allende and Eduardo Galeano, Diane Di Prima and Allen Ginsberg, Gerald Locklin and Ron Koertge. At their core, these poems document the call to meaning making and what it means to maintain dignity in the context of suffering. In this collection you will find stories of death squad rapists and plasma-selling dictators, of the woman who makes the perfect blue corn tortilla, and the man who sweeps the lonely town square before it awakes to twenty-million souls. A tender and often heartbreaking collection, Trotting Race of Time is evidence that the creation literature and healing are not mutually exclusive aims.
What People are Saying about Trotting Race of Time
Rich Furman’s remarkable collection of poetry, Trotting the Race of Time, summons up in riveting detail a Mexico and Central America marked by poverty and violence. The immersive poems document encounters with children, soldiers, candy sellers, revolutionaries, mothers, and fieldworkers-turned-killers in haunting lines, their humanity illuminated by Furman’s compassionate eye. The dreams and sorrows of the late twentieth century here shine and grab the reader as relevant as ever, a source of current trouble and hope.
~ Kathryn Rhett, MFA, Professor of English at Gettysburg College,
poet and nonfiction writer, author of Immortal Village, Souvenir, and Near Breathing
Trotting Race of Time is transformative poetry at its finest—work that goes straight to the heart.
~ Nicholas F. Mazza, PhD, Editor, Journal of Poetry Therapy,
President, National Association for Poetry Therapy,
Dean and Patricia V. Vance Professor Emeritus, Social Work, Florida State University
In Trotting Race of Time Rich Furman demonstrates his mastery of the narrative form—poems that traverse, narrate, and reflect. His deft language and imagery crackle. To perform these acts of witness that are so important, especially during this cultural moment, Furman and his poems “reach down into words as seeds of living.”
~ Jack Martin, MFA, recipient of the Colorado Council on the Arts Poetry Award. Martin’s works have appeared in Agni, Another Chicago Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Diagram, The Midwest Quarterly, Ploughshares, River Styx, Quarterly West, and many other magazines.
The poems that comprise Trotting Race of Time illuminate truths seemingly impossible to capture. The author’s daring lyricism gives the reader no choice but to travel by his side, suffer in the blister heat, and wonder.
~ Roger Roffman, PhD, Author of Marijuana Nation (Pegasus, Books)
Are words, images, and ideas irresistible? Rich Furman answers this query with a bold “yes.” No ordinary compilation—poems that lure you, draw you toward a Central America you must meet.
~ Peter Szto, Ph.D. Arts-based researcher, Professor of Social Work, University of Nebraska Omaha