Trotting Race of Time

Rich Furman

jun 2020 · University Professors Press

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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.

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Rich Furman, MFA, MSW, PhD, is the author or editor of over fifteen books, including a collection of flash nonfiction/prose poems, Compañero (Main Street Rag, 2007). Other books include The Immigrant Other: Global and Transnational Issues (Oxford University Press, 2016), Social Work Practice with Men at Risk (Columbia University Press, 2010), and Practical Tips for Publishing Scholarly Articles (Oxford University Press, 2012). His work has been published in Another Chicago Magazine, Bluestem, Chiron Review, Sweet, Hawai’i Review, Pearl, Coe Review, The Evergreen Review, Black Bear Review, Red Rock Review, Sierra Nevada Review, New Hampshire Review, Penn Review, and many others. He is Professor of Social Work at the University of Washington Tacoma. A qualitative researcher whose work is situated on the boundary between the expressive arts and the social sciences, he is one of the pioneers of poetic inquiry. He received his MFA in creative nonfiction from Queens University of Charlotte’s MFA-Latin America program. He is, or has been in former incarnations, a punk, dishwasher, laminator, photographer, dad, social worker, busboy, chemical-spill cleaner, telemarketer, Time/Life bookseller, dance club bouncer, and dog petter. Petting dogs is what he does, and enjoys, best.