Lucretia Rhys Samuel
Poetry, English and Creative Writing
At My Post
About the Project
Moving from California to the Midwest just six months before the pandemic, I found myself navigating an inhibited experience of the way Chicago transforms as seasons swell and fade. Growing up in a small town that roughly flirted around the orbit of sweater weather, I was so captivated to watch the way the environment and all of its inhabitants responded to the season’s changes. Variations in the weather usher in changes to everything around us—the way the plants grow, how animals react, how people behave, and what we all talk about.
"At My Post" was one of the first of many poems written on my Bucktown porch while observing these visceral responses. After the leaves on the neighboring trees died at the close of my first autumn in the city and I realized the jagged view I had of Chicago’s skyline, I watched the world from that porch. I would sit and try to simply exist in the act of being present, and I found myself reflecting on the balance between what’s tangible and what’s fleeting and the way that memory seems to be stored so intrinsically in the natural world. I was intrigued that a setting so immobile and stationary could distill such stimulation.
Under city-mandated lockdown at the start of the pandemic, this was my haven during the spring and summer of 2020. It was the place I felt most safe to witness the city melt out of winter, bloom into spring, and erupt into summer. “At My Post” is an attempt to make artifact out of existence. It is a dedication to the opportunities I was able to still have on my porch when the world shut down: to watch those trees grow over my city view, listen to the bugs flirt with the bulbs at dusk, and sit in it all with the person who shared it with me.
About Lucretia Rhys Samuel
Lucretia Rhys Samuel grew up on the Central Coast of California in a small town called Los Osos. After her move to the Bay Area, she attended City College of San Francisco where she pursued an associate degree in English and worked as an assistant poetry editor for Forum Literary Magazine. Since moving to Chicago in the fall of 2019, she has been pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Columbia College. Most recently, she has been a reader for Columbia’s Allium Journal, and her work has been featured in “Made Alone Together” published by Good Words Press.
Outside of school, she can be found riding her bike with no hands down Lake Street or hogging the xerox machine at Fed Ex publishing her own zines. Her favorite place to write is her back porch, especially in the summer when surrounded by the screech of cicadas. As a teacher once told her to “trust her obsessions”, Lucretia keeps striving to find more ways to write about the bugs and the birds, Lake Michigan and the Pacific Ocean, and the unrelenting struggle to emulate David Berman’s line: “Somewhere in the future, I am remembering today.” Her poetry mainly explores the themes of observation and the natural world; how memory is inseparable from landscape; and the balance between the perceptible and the ineffable.
“Lulu Samuel has a gift—a gift for cultivating empathy through poems that root deeply in family and lush domestic spaces—she is a poet making a home--and I expect every reader will visit.”
-CM Burroughs, Associate Professor of Poetry, English and Creative Writing