Shepherd's Hour

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.