In Praise of Detours
poems by
Rachel Landrum Crumble
~76 pages, $14 (+ shipping)
Projected Release Date: January 2026
An Advance Sale Discount price of $8 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $13/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
PLEASE NOTE: Ordering in advance of the release date entitles the buyer to a discount. It does not mean the book will ship before the date posted above and the price only applies to copies ordered through the Main Street Rag Online Bookstore.
Rachel Landrum Crumble is a life-long poet and retired teacher. Sister Sorrow (Finishing Line Press 2022) was her first poetry book. She has an MFA from Vermont College. Over the course of her career, she has received scholarships to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Vermont College Post-Graduate Poetry Manuscript Workshop, and Vermont Studio Center. For her current work on a novel, she was accepted to The GoodLit Writers Retreat. She and her husband, a jazz drummer, are Yankee transplants to Chattanooga, Tennessee where they have raised three children as an interracial couple. They have three grandchildren. [Find her on Substack @rachellandrumcrumble336439 or at poetteachermom.com.]
It is evident from this collection’s first poem that this is a body of work crafted with heart, wisdom, spirit, and witness. Across four sections, Crumble interrogates the human condition, old and new America, race and racism, and more. In Praise of Detours is not just a beautiful book but a necessary one that announces to the reader that family, faith, the country, and this very life are things one must always fight for. ~Christian J. Collier
“We each carry / a breakable heart” (“Daylight Savings”). Rachel Landrum Crumble’s fearsomely raw collection In Praise of Detours explores changing family and personal dynamics in a world beset with troubles, chaos, and, yes, joy. Crumble challenges society’s outlook about race and politics and declares “I am weary of the fast-moving traffic / of this world” (“Back Roads”) but offers hope in “Sequestered Autumn” with “[w]hat is this season / if not practice for Heaven?” ~KB Ballentine, author of All the Way Through and Spirit of Wild
Courage for a New Year
All familiar things
are released of connotation.
In these early hours, starting over
seems possible:
A shoe on the step
becomes hopeful, loses
its dereliction—
was going somewhere
all along.
Paper clutter
on a bedroom shelf
vibrates with history.
Old photos, proof
of a hard-won past
forecast an unexpected
cheery present.
The blank page is a blizzard,
and on dogsled we course our way
through blinding brightness.
While the year is young,
it seems possible to arrive.
We cannot lose our way
before we find it.
In Praise of Detours
At the starting line of my white
suburban guilt, I first foresaw a tweedy
liberal blue-blood in my future,
a family friend. Then—God forbid—
a disheveled manic angel.
I was on my way to an addiction
to unstable men who would disappoint me,
fair-haired, blue-eyed progeny, a divorce.
But traffic was heavy.
I was impatient and took a detour.
You were on your way to winning
a black trophy wife to please your father,
who always disappointed you.
You were this quirky drummer
with a blowout ‘fro, a laugh and a stutter.
You never wanted to date a white woman
again, and I didn’t care. I thought you were sent
on some mission of rescue by a mutual friend.
Not sure what you saw, but you couldn’t
leave me alone. You called me from the phone
in my dorm lobby and took your time asking me out.
35 years later, our three children
have your heart-shaped face, and my smile,
conceived in the laughter we share.
Tonight, I arrive here, knowing I have loved you
more than half my life,
and that more than this house
you are my home.
Racism is Not a Bone
“I don’t have a racist bone in my body.”
~Joe Biden and Donald Trump
It is a proclivity, however latent
in the human to make self
the measure of all things.
It is a specific slight, or grudge doused
with lighter fluid waiting for a spark
of generalization to incinerate
a people group to featureless toast.
It is my cup of tea, or your
plate of sushi, made into law.
It is a symphony of scapegoating,
as in Trump’s crowd chanting:
“Send her back.”
It is brown untreated Flint River water
leeching lead from old pipes,
sickening a poor and predominately
Black population for years.
It is glad-handing in Black churches
while funding agencies that abort
nearly three times more Black babies
than White ones. *
It is the syntax of suffering
labeled “non-standard”
by the propaganda of privilege.
Chicken Little to Testify Before Congress
Downwind of Washington, Orphic weather
purples the watercolor washed
space holder for Sky.
No collusion?
Is this Distortion’s corruption,
or Corruption’s distortion?
Machiavellianism
revokes Truth’s Visa.
It’s a braggart’s holiday.
The sky has fallen on terrorized families
separated in internment camps at the border,
on the rising tide of Global Warming.
Deputized border guards order Lady Liberty
to relinquish her torch —Hands up!—
and flip off the world.
Public discourse is exchanged
for niche marketing,
a Tower of Babel.
Reason sleeps at the bottom of a cold well
with autumn’s last leaves.
The sky has fallen.
