{"id":12783,"date":"2026-02-25T14:00:20","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T14:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/?p=12783"},"modified":"2026-05-08T01:36:42","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T01:36:42","slug":"accumulated-lessons-in-displacement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/farefwd.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/25\/accumulated-lessons-in-displacement\/","title":{"rendered":"Accumulated Lessons in Displacement"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Lessons in Drawing Closer<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Rachel Hicks\u2019s poetry shows the powerful role words play in bridging the gap between everyday experience and the divine.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Review by Elise Tegegne<\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Accumulated Lessons in Displacement<\/em>, Rachel E. Hicks\u2019s debut poetry collection, gives voice to the \u201cbright sadness\u201d and \u201cbitter joy\u201d of sojourns both spatial and spiritual. Drawing from her years as a global nomad and her journey of faith in Christ, Hicks explores the emotional terrain of experiences like losing electricity in the Himalayan foothills, pranking her ayah<\/em> in Old Delhi, and exchanging adolescent kisses on a rooftop in Amman\u2014all remembered from her current perch in Baltimore. Through these particularities, Hicks illumines the broader reality of human life as a pilgrimage on this planet, and our longing to find expression for the ineffable through connection with others.<\/p>

This yearning to connect is seen perhaps most directly in \u201cEverything Is a Departure,\u201d where Hicks evokes images of separation in the aftermath of a meal between two people at a restaurant. The narrator\u2019s opening words descend into a void, receiving no response: \u201cYou\u2019re closing the magazine; \/ I\u2019m calculating \/ the tip.\u201d The poem continues with images of disconnected phone lines, monarchs leaving for the warm south, a city silently sinking into the sea. The sense of isolation is heightened through modern usage of the technology that mediates much of human interaction through screens and clouds. Nostalgic for the days of landline telephones, the narrator says, \u201cToday I longed to speak to an operator \/ whose fingers would connect \/\/ my vocal vibrations to someone \/ who was waiting for them.\u201d In an age where connection is often disembodied, Hicks expresses a longing for a specifically tangible intimacy.<\/p>

Words are one of the tools Hicks finds to create these longed-for connections. She expresses a fascination with the powers and limitations of words, at one point dedicating a whole poem to a meditation on the word \u201ccusp.\u201d Hicks even employs the occasional non-English word to express precise meaning lost in translation. The poem \u201cKou \u53e3,\u201d meaning \u201cmouth\u201d (Hicks has a fascination for mouths, often referencing them in her poems), closes with the common Mandarin Chinese question \u201cJi kou ren<\/em> \/ literal translation: \/\/ How many mouth-people \/ your household?<\/em>\u201d, evoking with startling poignancy the suffering of those who hunger. By employing a non-English word, Hicks uncovers another dimension of what it means to be human, finding in another language a strange but somehow familiar articulation of one of our own deepest needs.<\/p>

Many of Hicks\u2019s poems unfold between two people finding connection through vocalized words. She shows how the enfleshed act of speech, the exchange of sound vibrations between two bodies, ties people together in a close, united physical space. The narrator in \u201cCome Kneel,\u201d asks for her friend to uphold her through prayer: \u201cTonight I need the prayer that you would pray,\u201d while the narrator in \u201cIt Wasn\u2019t Odd\u201d cradles her elderly neighbor who \u201csought me out\u201d saying \u201cI\u2019m dying<\/em> \u2026 It\u2019s coming now, baby.<\/em>\u201d Sometimes even mispronounced words can form intimate bonds. In \u201cYou Kept Trying to Say Butter<\/em>,\u201d the narrator says to her friend, \u201cBut I couldn\u2019t \/ understand you.\u201d Though the friends share an intimate moment of wordless laughter, the narrator wishes \u201cwe could speak \/ together \/\/ easy in your \/ mother tongue.\u201d<\/p>

In addition to conversing with others, sometimes the narrator engages in dialogue with saints\u2014and even Christ. Using unexpected imagery conjured by evocative language, Hicks weaves a bridge of intimacy connecting readers to the \u201cgreat cloud of witnesses\u201d and the One for Whom they lived and died. \u201cYou despise every offering that doesn\u2019t come broken. \/ We hate to come empty-handed. \/\/ (Nobody could make this stuff up.)\u201d In Hicks\u2019s honest, human portraits of the saints, we are given the gift of seeing them anew. Through the eyes of Mary and Joseph\u2019s neighbor, the reader experiences the slaughter of little boys younger than two after Jesus\u2019s birth (\u201cThen in the pregnant dark, \/ a chuckling softly at a mule: Joseph from next door\u2014\u201d), the ambivalence of Job\u2019s later years (\u201cYet the skin around these scars \/ pulls and itches, flares red;\u201d), and the often unacknowledged bitterness of Joseph\u2019s exile (\u201cYet what if you are not the favored son, but one who woke \/ from dreams, number twelve in line for your father\u2019s attentions,\u201d). By offering real-world, gritty context, Hicks breathes oft-told Bible stories into visceral, discomfiting life.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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The work is a wrestling with words, a wrestling like Jacob with the angel, to express the inexpressible sorrows and joys of being a pilgrim on this planet.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Throughout her poems, Hicks gives a voice not only to herself as a global nomad, but to those who often suffer in silence. The reader hears the first-person stories of a depressed person (\u201cDepression, Annotated\u201d), a raped woman (\u201cThe Truth about the River\u201d), and a woman who dies in a tsunami (\u201cThe Hill About Minamisanriku\u201d). In one of her most heart-rending poems, Hicks draws the reader\u2019s attention to a newborn girl in India who was drowned shortly after birth for being female. The mother \u201ctrembles, foresees \/\/ how rivers will run dry \/ and dust choke and strangle \/\/ the mechanisms of the turning world \/ because of the disappeared.\u201d Hicks highlights how even a silent death can jar the wheels of the world. When we do not attend to the voices of all God\u2019s creatures, even those of the magnificent cicadas in \u201cCicadas, East of Eden,\u201d we fail \u201cutterly \/ at our original vocation.\u201d<\/p>

In her work\u2019s title poem, one of Hicks\u2019s narrators shows how the inability to vocalize trauma silences and isolates the displaced. \u201cI was unable to speak for many days. \/ Natural expressions, gestures\u2014I lost this language. \/\/ No one understood, perhaps not even my wife.\u201d Yet Hicks also acknowledges how the absence of words can be fertile soil for growth. The narrator continues, \u201cI let silence have its way: germination was occurring.\u201d<\/p>

Though vocalized words open doors to connection, some silences can open space for a different kind of intimacy\u2014one beyond words. The narrator revels in the introversion of November, how the low clouds stop her words \u201clike gauze in my mouth.\u201d And in \u201cMelancholy,\u201d Hicks references the Book of Revelation, writing of \u201cthe hand of silence cupping me\u201d as she longs for the city where there is no pain or sorrow or death. These meditations allow Hicks to explore the possibility that, though words can be doors to intimacy, they can sometimes become barriers. In \u201cThe Morning After Freddie Gray\u2019s Funeral,\u201d the narrator recalls her perplexity in the wake of Freddie Gray\u2019s death and the acquittal of the six officers at whose hands he suffered fatal injuries. \u201cMy words failed: yes, but<\/em>\u2014and not that simple<\/em>. \/ I have no ready language for this\u2014\u201d. The harsh angles of the em-dashes breaking up her words express her inability to vocalize a response to tragedy. She settles for making mint tea to give to her Black neighbors, finding an image of redemption in the steeping tea: \u201cIn the kitchen, mint and black tea leaves \/ mingle, staining the clear water \/ irrevocably, which, at least, seems right.\u201d<\/p>

Hicks\u2019s poetry seeks to alchemize the raw material of her nomadic experiences into meaning. The work is a wrestling with words, a wrestling like Jacob with the angel, to express the inexpressible sorrows and joys of being a pilgrim on this planet. Words, particularly those exchanged in conversation, become the nexus of the spiritual and embodied. In this beautiful collection, Hicks’s poems recall not only the incarnation of thought into word, but the mystery of a God enfleshed into the eternal Word: \u201cthe Voice,\u201d calling out to sojourners in reverberations of ineffable love.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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Elise Tegegne<\/strong> is a writer and editor. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Seattle Pacific University, and her work has appeared in Plough<\/em>, Ekstasis<\/em> by Christianity Today<\/em>, The Windhover<\/em>, and Fathom<\/em>, among others. Her new release In Praise of Houseflies: Meditations on the Gifts in Everyday Quandaries<\/em> (Calla Press, 2025<\/a>) is now available wherever books are sold. She taught French in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and now lives stateside. Connect with her on social media<\/a> or her website<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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Accumulated Lessons in Displacement<\/strong><\/em> was published by Wipf and Stock Publishers on June 30, 2025. Fare Forward<\/em> appreciates the provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy here<\/a>.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rachel Hicks\u2019s poetry shows the powerful role words play in bridging the gap between everyday experience and the divine. 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