The River Is Rising

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley and her family fled their native country of Liberia after suffering tremendous privations and violence during the bloody Liberian Civil War in 1991. These poems are more than the story of one woman who carried her children over dead bodies, walking dozens of miles from Monrovia, through dirty streams amidst government soldier and rebel killing fields, fleeing bombs and constant gun battles, who with her husband and small children were forced to survive on roots in a displacement camp outside Monrovia, where they witnessed every kind of crime against women. Jabbeh Wesley did more than survive. She helped other women. She wrote.