Roberta Senechal de la Roche

Roberta Senechal de la Roche's poems express a rage against transience, a sense of alienation from nature, and a search for the lost supernatural in a secular age. Darkly lyrical and tenderly elegiac, her poems reach across space and time in a yearning search for transcendence. Here voices speak to the dead, and the dead speak back. Gods, parents, lovers, refugees, and tribal people speak, then disappear. In their disenchanted world, lost voices lament the fall of empires, faithlessness, betrayal, and decay.

Winner of The Heartland Review Press's 2018 Poetry Chapbook contest, Roberta Senechal de la Roche's After Eden takes us on a wonderful existential journey, and experience everyone should read.

This book by Roberta Senechal de la Roche explores themes that in part reflect her Native American background: a rage against transience, a sense of alienation from nature, and a discouraging search for the supernatural lost in a disenchanted world. Faith placed in the visible world seems problematic, as does the search for stability in human love. Hope instead seems to lie in the courage to be vulnerable and, in the end, in a single candle flickering in the dark.

This title explores the origins of a race riot. This detailed case study of the 1908 race riot in Springfield, Illinois, which began only a few blocks from Abraham Lincoln's family home, explores the social origins of rioting by whites against the city's African American community after a white woman alleged that a black man had raped her. Over two days rioters wrecked black-owned businesses, burned neighborhoods to the ground, killed two black men, and injured many others. Author Roberta Senechal de la Roche draws from a wide range of sources to describe the riot, identify the rioters and their victims, and challenge previous interpretations that attribute rioting to interracial competition for jobs, housing, or political influence. Written in a direct and clear style, ""In Lincoln's Shadow"" documents a violent explosion of racial hatred that shocked the nation and reveals the complexity of white racial attitudes in the early twentieth century.