In Pearl Broth, poet Rikki Santer twists language. She employs metaphor, rhyme and her own wit, “She Verbs now She Nouns,” to describe a world that, if not fallen, is at least one in which its inhabitants feel displaced. In Santer’s poetic world, we are instructed to “Forget where you are, where you’ve been, where you’re going. / Your global position is diminishing fast.” Ours, the poet informs us, is an “age of clickbaiting, news farming, filter bubbling, / deep faking, hive mind and post truth. . . .” Nevertheless, Santer is aware and makes her readers aware of what we have lost by giving way to the post truth world, which she so ably satirizes. In one of my favorite poems, “In the Company of Flowers,” the poet walks us through “rhythmic notations / vertical riffs of / ancestral petals / tiny gourds on tender edge / of rattle. . . .” The poem inspires us to let her witty description of a floral installation absorb and even heal our “memories of loss or love . . .” What more can we ask of poetry?
Doug Rutledge, PhD The Allure of Grammar: The Glamour of Angie Estes’s Poetry
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For those who may think poetry is obtuse and boring, In Pearl Broth: Poems New & Selected will shake that notion free. Rikki Santer’s poems are chock-full of vibrant language that evokes responses in both the busy mind and the quiet heart of the reader: piffling questions multiply like maggots . . . the mall tilts on its axis . . . we like handcuffing matters down . . . secret bag of caramels in a lingerie drawer . . . little swords of wheat . . . fuzzy-hearted commas . . . a marimba of alchemy . . . canapés of flummery . . . my museum of desperate clues. These poems stopped me in my tracks more than a few times. So moved by “A Swift and Fatal Plunge”, I spent an evening reading about the tragic event that inspired Santer’s stunning narrative. The notes I kept while reading In Pearl Broth will surely serve to inspire my own poem-making.
Susan F. Glassmeyer, Invisible Fish; 2018 Ohio Poet of the Year
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Featured Review Pudding Magazine: The Journal of Applied Poetry #68 by Kathleen Burgess
Name an icon of our past or a portent in today’s future, and you may find poet Rikki Santer has electrified it in her new release In Pearl Broth: Poems New and Selected. Ms. Santer has added new poems to her previous three chapbooks and three full-length collections. Tart satires rake the ultra-commercialized, human condition. We’re all in the soup, on an endangered list through chance and our own creations, hijacked by age, heartbreak, foolishness, foul play, love, lust, and cosmic accident.
The wand of this feminist rhabdomancer of word dance and black humor situates the makers of science and culture in new settings—Charles Darwin at a mall, Baby Esther’s misappropriated identity as Betty Boop romping on the Ganges; brother and sister act Dick and Jane of the ubiquitous basal readers as adults; artist Andy Warhol at the Kahiki Supper Club in Columbus, Ohio; a lubricious Wallace Stevens’s alter ego driving an ice cream truck; the musician of silence John Cage on a spider’s strand; as well as Stephen Hawking hosting time travelers.
Other creations and conditions—an analyst, secretaries from hell, naked Mother Goose, an eerie new fairy tale, her erasure poem from Walt Whitman, a Gertrude Stein photograph, Ginger Rogers’s ostrich dress, the inner zombie, a drive-in movie, explorers, artists, and gravitational waves—inhabit this book bursting with sexuality and a cosmos as threatening as inviting.
Come revel as “The Wig of the Bride of Frankenstein” caps In Pearl Broth with these lines:
My drag queen minions / … My Elsa uncredited / … My mummy birth /… My demented doctor bridesmaids / My same sex parents / My it’s alive alive /My Nefertiti echo / My beehive electric / … My robotic bird head / … My screeches played backwards / My angry swan hiss / My bride of fire / … My imagine yourself standing by the wreckage of the moon / My you know howlightning alarms me.
To be immersed in her “wildfire contagion” (“Woman Painting Women,”) to be taken by poetry that delights, grieves, tells tales of forgotten heroes, defends, and startles you awake to the temperature of political and cultural climate out to stew you alive, read this book.
AVAILABLE FROM STUBBORN MULE PRESS
https://stubbornmulepress.bigcartel.com/
ISBN: 978-1-950380-28-2 $15.00
Copies are also available from the poet. Please contact her through this website.