Shepherd's Hour - Softcover

Santer, Rikki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1957755539 ISBN 13: 9781957755533

Publisher: Lily Poetry Review, 2025

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Rikki Santer's poetry has been published widely and has received many honors including Pushcart and Ohioana book award nominations, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and in 2023 she was named Ohio Poet of the Year. She is a member of the teaching artist roster of the Ohio Arts Council and a past vice-president of the Ohio Poetry Association. She has had published seven full-length poetry collections and seven chapbook sequences exploring such topics as the Hopewell earthworks of Newark, Ohio; the late Kahiki Supper Club of Columbus, Ohio; the art of ventriloquism, the complex world of fashion, and the TV series Twilight Zone. Her collection, Resurrection Letter, dedicated to surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, was grand prize short-listed for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and Shepherd's Hour, won the Paul Nemser Book Prize from Lily Poetry Review Books. Please contact her through her website https: //rikkisanter.com

Edition details

• Publisher: Lily Poetry Review
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1957755539
• ISBN 13: 9781957755533
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96
• Editor: Cleary Eileen