Rikki Santer’s dazzling How to Board a Moving Ship makes the familiar brilliantly strange again. Neighbors are bears in “golden vanilla coats,” garden gnomes wander, adolescence is electric and ever present, headlines promise life on other planets, and the cruel pageantry of our government is loud as a carnival. Between the lights and neighborhoods and catwalks, loss lives here, too, as when Santer describes her mother: “the palindrome of my mother’s / chest scars, targets where her breasts used to be.” Santer is both a magician and our Virgil, guiding us through each vignette, whether it’s a vision from childhood – “memories wash / lean in the tides—red rover, red rover” – or “the politics of textile” and the splendor and harm of fashion. Santer invites us to marvel and reminds us that even in an unpredictable and painful world, there is still so much wonder ready for an audience.
Ruth Awad, author of Set to Music a Wildfire.
There is a journey throughout How to Board a Moving Ship that plays with myth in a way only an insightful writer like Rikki Santer can. The scaffolding built early in the collection regarding memory and girlhood hold up the later pieces orbiting the specter of the carnival and its participants. This is where the balancing of nostalgia and pragmatism in Santer’s writing shines, as we hear the wonder and play in the writing intertwined with implications of where the poems live, where the poems come from. Santer navigates this without losing sight of the idea that we and all our of insights come from somewhere. For many, there’s an impulse to bury these things, but Santer lays them bare. This book is a great exploration of how we survive what we do and how we can wrap ourselves around all of ways we’re still here, sharp as they may be.
William Evans, author of We Inherit What the Fires Left
“How to Board a Moving Ship is a dynamic journey through personal and societal reflection and proclamation. The poems in this book possess a refreshing verve for finding unique language and perspectives, no matter if they happen to be analyzing the musculature of grief or the absurdities of popular culture and fashion. Throughout this collection, Santer displays an admirable knack for traversing an array of subjects while maintaining sincerity and a swiftness toward discovery.”
Marcus Jackson, author of Pardon My Heart
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ISBN: 978-1-7365990-6-8 $18.00
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