Tarot cards are spooky little mirrors, showing us aspects of ourselves we can’t ordinarily see. As painted by British-Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington, they open a dreamhouse of uncanny figures: Fool, Hanged Man, Priestess, Chariot, Moon. Rikki Santer’s Resurrection Letter enters this imaginal space with poems as rich and strange as Carrington’s cards. Arranged on the page in the manner of tarot, these poems chart a doubled journey, a “pilgrim’s path” of sisters-in-art: Leonora and Rikki. The story shifts and grows with each new poem/card. Here is a longing to escape convention, here is a willingness to “leap.” Here is the harrowing cost of female brilliance (envisioned as “itching” from inner fire). Here is art as lifeblood, as salvation. Here is home as self-created bohemian nest, kitchen as alchemy, motherhood as joy. Travel, imaginative and actual, is essential: “in order to be,/go where you are not,” one poem/card counsels. Those familiar with Carrington’s dramatic life and otherworldly art will find Santer’s poems steeped in references, an opulent tea. And Santer’s own images vibrate with what one poem calls “delicious morbidities,” offering us the glittery promise of “sequined tunnels” and the genteel trap of a room like a “furnished stable.” Intimate, visionary, deft and surprising, Santer’s Resurrection Letter pays passionate homage to Carrington, answering art with art. 

—Audrey Hackett, award-winning poet and journalist

A rich homage to the vision & joy of surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, Rikki Santer casts herself as fellow traveler, artist, magician, and liberator, sweeping us across time and space as she follows Leonora through sequined tunnels and sister moons, gothic mansions, and the shaman’s cloak of the Tarot. A book that will not only delight but transform, Resurrection Letter invites us to stand with Santer and Carrington at the crossroads where we are “simultaneously beauty and beast, raked and raking”—complex visionaries “ready to recast a narrow, stubborn world.”

 —Rebe Huntman, author, My Mother in Havana

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Materialist Press/Cereal Box Studio (www.cerealboxstudio)

ISBN 978-1-7335169-8-3

March 2023

$20.00 (available from the publisher or contact me and I will be quite happy to send you a copy of this artfully printed book.)