$16 | Essays

RANCHER
Selah Saterstrom

To heal is to be changed, to be, potentially, revolutionized by the fracture whose initial presence signals as a wound. For all of its pain, the fracture sends out new lay lines – new paths of inquiry that necessitate new modes of knowing and being-with. Rancher follows such paths into the uncanny territories of life after rape: What happens when a lie becomes the truth? What happens when the ghost haunting your house turns out to be you? Saterstrom considers these questions with the oracular input of saints behaving subversively, black widow spiders, and a host of ghosts and friends alike. Pocket paperback edition. With original color illustrations by H.C. Dunaway Smith

March 2021 // Essay
4″ x 6″ // Pocket Paperback // 54pp // $16
ISBN: 978-1-941681-27-5

PRAISE FOR RANCHER

“Selah Saterstrom writes books that are alive, books that breathe and shape-shift and do whatever the hell they need to do. Sometimes it feels impossible to be alive, which means Selah writes impossible shit. She does it by being gracious enough to allow contradictions to share the same space, and allowing things to be what they are until they reveal themselves as something else, and allowing disparate similarities to collide when least expected. All of this is in the service of listening, loving, and some real-ass caring.”
–STEVEN DUNN, author of Water & Power

“Maybe talking ‘around’ rape is the most interesting way to talk ‘about’ rape because in talking ‘around’ rape we enter rape’s surrounds. There a girl eats day-old Bear Claws from the Piggly Wiggly while her rapist sleeps soundly in his rancher with in-ground swimming pool. Or we learn that there, in rape’s surrounds, once, a long time ago, a girl was made into a saint for being raped, but then they canonized her rapist, too. There, or here, though, we also find schoolyard girls, lots of them, who, when asked, How do you solve a problem like…? know the answer is to chase the rapist down and kick his teeth in. In other words, in talking around rape, Saterstrom tells us all about it.”
–MAGDALENA ZURAWSKI, author of The Tiniest Muzzle Sings Songs of Freedom


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Selah Saterstrom is the author of five books: Rancher, Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics, Slab, The Meat and Spirit Plan, and The Pink Institution. She teaches and lectures across the United States, and is the director of Creative Writing at the University of Denver.


MORE NONFICTION YOU MIGHT LIKE…