Poet Riki San­ter simul­ta­ne­ous­ly exca­vates and evokes mul­ti­ple lay­ers of mem­o­ry in this prize-win­ning vol­ume of forty-six poems. Com­posed most­ly in free verse, this col­lec­tion also uses the prose poem and makes occa­sion­al for­ays into the ghaz­al and the ekphras­tic to explore the ways in which Jew­ish remem­brance is con­tra­dic­to­ry, unset­tled, and fraught with trau­ma. What can poet­ry do with such a his­to­ry? Santer’s answer is to guide us through the past, oblige us to expe­ri­ence it, and leave us on our own to fig­ure out what to think and do next. This ambigu­ous guid­ance is announced in the first poem, ​“Zemirot”:

I imag­ine Anne Frank’s shep­herd crook lead­ing me to safe­ty in her sheepfold. 

Moth­er turned her drei­del paper­weight to gimel so every­one could win. 

Anne Frank’s shep­herd­ing will lead the read­er not to safe­ty, but rather to the inescapa­bil­i­ty of the atroc­i­ties of the past, includ­ing the Shoah, that per­me­ate this col­lec­tion. What the read­er ​“wins” in this read­ing is not a sim­ple vic­to­ry, but a height­ened aware­ness of the forces — obvi­ous and hid­den — that have shaped Jew­ish history.

In fact, as the read­er pro­ceeds, it becomes clear that Santer’s shep­herd is less a guide than a col­lec­tor, as the poem ​“Col­lec­tor,” in the sec­ond sec­tion of the book, clarifies:

He’s been buy­ing and trad­ing for two decades, but before he’ll be ship­ping his entire his­tor­i­cal repos­i­to­ry to a Pol­ish muse­um, he sits me down at his din­ing room table.

The prose poem con­cludes — like the Japan­ese hybrid form, the hai­bun — with two sets of four lines, the final ones reading:

Wit­ness his passion

As he tries to hold

A slip­pery history

by its spiked and bloody tail.

Like the col­lec­tor in the poem, San­ter sits us down at her imag­is­tic table, and con­fronts us with a mass of pre­served objects for con­sid­er­a­tion: arti­facts, food, long lost rel­a­tives, places, and paint­ings, as well as the names and cir­cum­stances of famous Torah Jews, and Jews whom some of us have nev­er heard of.

This last ele­ment is per­haps the most fas­ci­nat­ing part of this col­lec­tion. One poem describes a luthi­er whose life work is locat­ing and restor­ing the vio­lins played by Jews in the death camps. Anoth­er gives col­lec­tive voice to the unnamed immi­grant women forced into sex­u­al slav­ery by the Zvi Migdal crime syn­di­cate in Brazil, Argenti­na, and the Unit­ed States. A third cel­e­brates for­got­ten Jew­ish women come­di­ans Pat­sy Abbot, Belle Barth, and Pearl Williams. And a fourth res­ur­rects a still unre­solved legal debate sur­round­ing pen­cil man­u­fac­tur­er Leo Frank, who was accused and prob­a­bly false­ly con­vict­ed of mur­der; he was lynched in Atlanta in 1913. 

These his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ences, at once painful and rev­e­la­to­ry, oblige us as read­ers to inquire fur­ther into these sto­ries. More­over, in gath­er­ing togeth­er these real peo­ple, Santer’s shep­herd-poet hopes to achieve for them a lyric res­ur­rec­tion and a ges­ture towards jus­tice, as described in ​“Reviv­ing Leo”:

Time says yes,

the day looks right.

You in your per­fect suit

and exquis­ite penmanship

fer­ried by a dream­like boat. 

Near the end of the col­lec­tion, the poet explains her com­plex mis­sion more ful­ly in the poem ​“Shepherd’s Can­to.” Nam­ing her­self ​“a clair­voy­ant of human vapor,” San­ter sees the poet simul­ta­ne­ous­ly as a prophet, his­to­ri­an, and mys­ti­cal care­giv­er who groups ​“iso­lat­ed thinkers at pas­ture” and who is her­self on a quest for the per­fect expres­sion: ​“a voice that looks for its throat.” 

This is a provoca­tive, image-rich col­lec­tion that chal­lenges read­ers to think beyond the page and to inves­ti­gate the hid­den cor­ners of our per­son­al and col­lec­tive histories.