What do we get from a poet blessed with a deep memory and rich imagination, whose “mother turned her dreidel paperweight to gimel so everyone could win”, and who inherited a cookbook that is a “midrash with/grandmother marginalia in Yiddish” ? Yes, the poems are that rich, that originally singular.  I could go on quoting from them and still want to quote more.  So much to love and admire in Shepherd’s Hour: the way Santer’s language can shift and combine a lyrical storytelling with a Chagall-like surrealism, the expansive depth and richness of her Jewish sources, from freshly imaginative visions of the familiar (ancestry, the Gollum, Lilith) to a retrieval of the (to me)  too-forgotten, as in  “Love Letter from Ghetto Girl Comedians to 21st Century Offspring,” in which she reminds us of Patsy Abbott, Belle Barth, and Pearl Williams.  Though a vegan, Santer still reserves a core in her Jewish soul for that delicious brisket, that nostalgia for the spiritual meat. Who wouldn’t want to be a cockroach on the wall of Golda’s party that invited all those lovely Biblical women warriors to their communal feast?  I’m overwhelmed by Santer’s expansiveness that can embrace the historical/cultural Judaic mishmash, from Jewcat to Leo Frank, from her uncle Max’s diner to Soutine’s pointillistic paintings.  Santer’s influences are prodigious (many are named in “Shepherd’s Cento”) but Shephard’s Hour collects a distinctive and delightful herd: radical, brilliant, soul-deep in heart-throbbing intelligence, outrageously Jewish, and ultimately singularly human.  Sender’s shepherd soul will feed your poetry sheep to full. Philip Terman author of The Whole MIshpocha: New and Selected Jewish Poems, 1998-2023 and My Blossoming Everything

In Rikki Santer’s Shepherd’s Hour, the pull of history and ancestry is compelling, a testament to what was lost and therefore must be remembered, even if only in the imagination. Poems wander from biblical, “Lilith finishes her Lucky/ and tosses its butt out the window of/ her oxblood Buick Riviera” to Barbie, from the Holocaust to a poem about Leo Frank, the Jewish man who was lynched by a mob in 1914. These poems radiate the power of language, where “Words can split the sea/ the word and the non-word/ manifesto stitching the air.” Carol V. Davis author of Below Zero

Rikki Santer’s Shepherd’s Hour is full of surprises: an anachronistic shepherd crouching  “among low bleats,” a Rabbi’s Jewcat, a flamingo menorah (my sister would like one,) a luscious warm bagel shepherding the speaker home though a scary night and described in such detail I ate of it too, and thoughtful art poems with engaging backstories. This is how culture warms, feeds, protects, and lives inside us. So many mishpocha brought to life in these pages: brave immigrant grandparents, Chiya, Rikel, Isac, Joseph, Uncle Saul, Uncle Lenny, and beat-kisser Auntie’s Jewish humor transcending death via gravestone. We taste memories of savory mouth-watering deli and home-cooked meats, from a vegetarian poet no less, as well as grief for the beautiful capable mother too soon lost. What to do with the epigenetic fear represented here: yearning for a Golem protector when embers of antisemitism flare, memories of the historical ruptures of Shoah, pogroms on back through time? Apply them, dear reader, to human suffering wherever it occurs, both then and now, for in the particular lies the universal, and all who suffer yet aspire, as Malamud suggests, are “Jews.” Charlene Fix author of Jewgirl

2023 Ohio Poet of the Year Rikki Santer’s new poetry collection, Shepherd’s Hour showcases Santer’s poetic virtuosity as it explores her cultural inheritance as a Jewish woman raised in the mid 20th century in America’s heartland. “How to pasture where I’m from?” Santer asks, gathering idiosyncratic family stories, personal and historic instances of anti-Semitism, weighing the poet’s veganism against the meat-laden cuisine of European Jewry, delighting in the expressiveness of Yiddish and achievements of Chagall. Winner of the Paul Nemser Prize from the Lily Poetry Foundation, Shepherd’s Hour pinpoints the intersection of history, culture, and geopolitics facing Jews in America today. Witty, elegiac, ironic, clear-eyed, and at times defiant, this book holds fast to what it uncovers: “Praise faith,” declares Santer, “that defies gravity, our most ancient language.”  Bonnie Proudfoot, author of the novel Goshen Road, long-listed for the PEN/Hemingway, and Household Gods, poems.

“Sometimes we are simpering wounds/ sometimes prayer/ the sugar and salt of memory.” So says Rikki Santer in her newest collection, Shepherd’s Hour. Indeed, these poems are sweetly seasoned with blintzes, butter cake, deli fare, and Manischewitz, along with other familiar ingredients and talismans from Jewish culture and tradition. But more importantly, we also witness her grieving lost family members and artistic heroes, as well as grappling with personal and generational scars. In this time and moment, I deeply appreciate how Santer both relishes and interrogates her connection to Judaism. Hannah Stephenson, author of  In the Kettle, the Shriek and Cadence

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