To Decorate A Casket by Bill Ratner

“I look for hidden meanings in incidental moments,” poet Bill Ratner says in “Try My Luck,” one of many intriguing poems in To Decorate A Casket. These highly original poems stir things up — a wild concoction of exploration, confession, and surreal fantasy, each topped with a soupçon of wry wit. Whether mourning the early demise of his beloved parents and older brother, or riffing on being the one left behind to come of age on his own, Ratner’s poems find life’s humor and sweetness. They kick off their shoes and dance with Death.

–Alexis Rhone Fancher, author of Junkie Wife, Poetry editor of Cultural Weekly.

“Reading these poems, one can’t help wondering if Ratner is a storyteller at heart who’s found the form of the poem to convey the snapshots and short tales of his life, or if he’s a poet who, like Homer, poured his dactyls into the epics of his time. Like a good storyteller, Ratner sidles up to you, whispers the opening of a tale, then brings in the big guns of poetry to make it all work. These poems are masterful, touching, evocative, and Ratner himself is a master-builder at work, a man who shapes words out of airy nothing and commands them to speak.”
–Jack Grapes, Last of the Outsiders, Chatwin Press

“Bill Ratner’s poetry is fearless and irreverent: bullets don’t scare me / I survived one for my mother’s breast / one for my brother’s kidneys / one for my father’s heart. He has gone through the tunnel and lived to tell the tale. Ratner holds nothing back, true to his own words, There is nothing so intimate / as a stranger’s body / near you in the water.  He invites you, the reader, to leave the shallow waters and meet him in the deep end.”

–Kohenet Rachel Kann, How to Bless the New Moon, Ben Yehuda Press