Chelsea Rathburn never felt rooted in Miami during her upbringing in South Florida.
To the Georgia poet laureate and author, Miami was always reinventing itself. Her family did so when they moved to Miami from Jacksonville when she was just a baby — moving from one rundown apartment to the next in south Miami-Dade County.
“ I was just about to go into kindergarten and we got this house in Palmetto Bay, my dad qualified for it through a VA loan, and we had no business moving into a house,” Rathburn told WLRN. “It was like a roof over our heads, and then no furniture in a lot of the rooms for a long time.”
Construction cranes were also rising up across the region almost as quickly as new condominiums and development, a reality that remains.
“ We have all of this beautiful, vibrant, cultural change, these influxes of new communities, new citizens,” said Rathburn. “It kind of feels like everybody's transient in a way.”
But more than two decades after moving away from South Florida, Rathburn would learn her roots in Miami run deep — all the way back to the city’s founding. She discovered family plots at the historic Miami City Cemetery, including that of her great-great grandfather John C. Tucker, the city's superintendent of the streets in 1906.
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“That kind of led into the development of this book,” said Rathburn, whose new collection of poems, titled ‘Broken Houses,’ is out July 29.
More than six years in the making, Rathburn’s book dives into her family history while also shedding light on Miami’s dark past. She writes about her childhood growing up in poverty, and unearths truths about her father’s time in foster care, all connecting to the central theme around home.
“The collection moves toward building a home in the world, beyond physical houses … through love and connection and family,” said Rathburn.
"It felt like all of these secret stories were rising out of invisible ink."
Tracing family roots through Miami's past
South Florida and Rathburn’s family history became intertwined as she researched for Broken Houses. First drafts of the book included historical city documents and old city advertisements.
“Eventually, I kind of talked some sense into myself,” said Rathburn. “I don't live there anymore, I'm looking back as an outsider.”
To Rathburn, she’d be re-telling the “same white settler history … already in the history books.” She has always been more interested in stories about dispossession and erasure.
Her research included reading a memoir by Miami’s third mayor John Sewell, who detailed the clearing of an ancient Tequesta burial mound to make way for the city’s first grand hotel. Rathburn also relied on local historian Marvin Dunn’s Black Miami in the Twentieth Century for a full account of the city’s settlement and the Black laborers who built it.
She felt it was important to bring these details into her poetry recounting her own — and Miami’s — roots.
“ When I was learning about Florida history, this was not the version that I was taught," said Rathburn. "I want to make sure that I'm telling those stories."
A childhood remembered only on paper
Researching her family history led Rathburn to uncovering her own father’s past.
Growing up, she knew her father had spent time in foster care, but assumed it was a brief stint. While sorting through a genealogy binder her grandmother had assembled, filled with old newspaper clippings, photographs and family documents, she discovered her father had actually been in foster care until he was about the age of seven.
"My father spent all of this time in foster care, and he remembers none of it," Rathburn said. "His memories really start when he arrives back in Miami as a seven-year-old."
The discovery prompted Rathburn to think about the lasting effects of a childhood marked by instability.
"Even in an unstable environment, we can find ways to lift each other up and build stable foundations out of one another."
"Having grown up with this very unstable childhood that he had, how did that affect his sense of self, his sense of stability as an adult?" she said. "In turn, my sense of stability and self, as I was growing up being raised by somebody who had such a shifting, unstable childhood."
Rathburn was able to track down census records that led her to the California family who had fostered her father. She turned to poetry to try and understand the people who cared for him during those formative years.
"It felt like all of these secret stories were rising out of invisible ink," said Rathburn. “I ended up writing a series of poems in the book that deal explicitly with my dad and his time in foster care."
Finding home beyond the house
Rathburn can remember what the floor felt like on her bare feet at the convenience store on Old Cutler Road. There’s also the distinct memory of sitting inside her father’s shabby 1973 Ford Pinto — asking, out of embarrassment, to be dropped off blocks away from Southwood Middle School.
“ It just felt like this marker of class and difference,” said Rathburn.
Even after Rathburn’s parents bought their house in Palmetto Bay — in which they still live today — there was always the fear that it would be taken away.
“ Like a lot of American families, I think we were always sort of one crisis away from being in a really bad place,” said Rathburn.
With three previous published poetry collections, Broken Houses is the first time she writes about her working-class upbringing — an experience that has shaped her in profound ways.
“For me, the idea of home or the house, it was something bigger than a physical structure,” said Rathburn. “It represented new possibility, something bigger and better.”
In Broken Houses, Rathburn tries to define what that house is for herself. And she hopes readers take away their own meaning.
“ I hope that they think about their own families, childhoods,” said Rathburn. “Think about the ways that, even in an unstable environment, we can find ways to lift each other up and build stable foundations out of one another.”
