Beloved Columbus Ohio poet Rikki Santer’s hand-stitched, hand-glued full length poetry collection is finally here!

Fishing for Rabbits is the work of a poet for whom sonic richness and structural experiment are paramount. History and pop culture collide here like Santer’s crackling syllables. Darwin, Stein, and Vermeer, Ohio Indian Mounds, the RCA Victor dog, even the rotary phone–all mash up in this Boomer smorgasbord of a first book. “How many horses will it take//to bind that bucket?” Santer asks. “This lion is tenting tonight,//muscling across a noodled sky,/Manifesto humid and concentric.” The energy of this book will blow the rabbits right out of the Olentangy.

 

—Kathy Fagan, author of LIP

In searching for the rabbit in the magician’s top hat, Rikki Santer tumbles down into another world where everything we know is tilted, transformed by fresh language. The magic is in seeing through the prism of her poetry. Fishing for Rabbits is a brimful miscellany, ‘clothesline logic’ in an imaginative windstorm, with surprises at every turn: the tonic of Dada; Dick and Jane hop scotching through a wacky, grown-up world; elegies for a world spawned by memory and a past that wants us back; digging into the minds of painters and into the consecrated grounds of the Hopewell mounds; poems that probe the inner life, among them the lovely “Sky Burial.” That and more. Enjoy your fall down the rabbit hole. You will linger over these poems.

 

—Maj Ragain, author of A HUNGRY GHOST SURRENDERS HIS TACKLEBOX