These poems do indeed “dodge, tuck, roll” with their unflinching argument that one needs “another logic” to prevail. What’s to dodge or roll away from? Ultimately, the inevitable “whirling death girder,” as in waiting for a biopsy while “godding . . . for right results,” or sympathizing with a friend about to be widowed again, his “two wives dealt sentence, paragraph, chapters.” Yes, Santer ponders a fate akin to Job’s with a writerly pun. So where do we find that other logic to ease the way? In just that sort of wit, in starlings, the moon, fireflies, memory of mother in hats, trees, music, in humor like “the coral flush of flockus plasticus” flamingos, and in art—its lushness and triumphant translations, its “pact” with “sorrow,” and ability to limn “dignity into what was knarled.” Santer finds solace in film and sensory seductions that include food: hence the elegy to Anthony Bourdain, nor does she neglect dreams and a Ouija board for help to peer beyond the beyond. She slows us down and speeds us up with puns, formal patterns, keen insights, striking images—like “the peach and cream gingham of a ripped party dress,” and musical phrases—my favorite: “you came to me this morning buoyant in a dream.” Sometimes the sheer density beckons deep reading, yet other times, poems, like “Uncle Max’s Deli,” speak so clearly we fall right in. There are series of poems here to ride: poems about art, dreams, food, and Betty Boop. What is Betty doing here, you ask? Plenty, with her be-bop slang. This sequence asks us to consider what Betty signifies, that Jazz-Age “Goth Lolita,” that “eternal vamp” who, by “filling in for Lucy,” reminds us how art travels through time to sustain us in the present.  Santer has her ears to the airwaves, the ground. She listens to owls who “know more than they should.” She transcribes vibrations. Come listen.

Charlene Fix, author of Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat (Bottom Dog Press), Frankenstein’s Flowers (CW Books), Harpo Marx as Trickster (McFarland), and Flowering Bruno: A Dography (XOXOX Press)

Rikki Santer’s Dodge, Tuck, Roll is an eruption of measured delight in a boop-boop-a-doop world. What Elizabeth Spires has called “the great body of the world”—that great body (and beating heart) is the source of these poems. As the opening poem tells us: “You dodge and tuck and roll under the whirling death / girder. You do the trick you pose you smile—applause.” Vision is centerstage. And we feel as if we’re in the presence of “owls / that seem to know more than they should.” Rikki Santer’s poems remind me of an iPhone photograph shoved to life when you press the screen. In the words of the Betty Boop poems: “She’s in my cortex / this gartered Goth Lolita / eyelashes like knives / crimson bullet lips / dog collar spiked.”

Roy Bentley, 2018 finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City

There  is plenty of heft and whimsy in the poems of Rikki Santer.  Besides her obvious love of language and its play, she ruminates over failed relationships, environmental peril, internet addiction, health scares, and death.  But there is also a well-balanced celebration of music, art, and nature to appreciate.  Betty Boop is reconsidered as only a feminist might.  A food and art mashup with appearances by Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Stephen Hawking and abstractions of culinary possibilities leave the reader dizzy.  Reading Santer’s poems is an experience of synesthesia as she navigates the “thin membrane between apocalypse & carnival.”  Dodge, Tuck, Roll is a book to be savored.

Review in Pudding Magazine:  The Journal of Applied Poetry  by Editor/Publisher, Connie Willett Everett

YOU CAN ORDER THIS BOOK DIRECTLY FROM THE PUBLISHER, CRISIS CHRONICLES PRESS:  http://ccpress.blogspot.com/