Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone: Horse in the Dark by Vievee Francis is out at last. The second book by a wonderful poet (and friend, and inspiration), it is the winner of the Cave Canem/Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize.
New Yorkers: Francis is reading from the collection today at the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, as part of New York University's public reading series. Gregory Pardlo is introducing; Sheila Carter-Jones and Mitchell L. H. Douglas will also read. You most certainly should be there.
Horse in the Dark is rooted in Texas myth, story, and landscape: the publisher renders these poems as "panhandle folktales" and poet Adrian Matejka describes them as...
...revelations—of memory, of dust, of the cotton and marginalia strung together to make a history. Her poems remind [us] that geography is fluid and camouflaged by our own memories, memories that are often anthropomorphized by the mechanisms of race and place. And when the poems lean sideways to whisper something necessary, or rise up to tell another kind of truth, history is distilled like moonshine, each moment perfect and dangerous.
Horse in the Dark was recently featured on Indiana Public Radio; Francis read several poems. Francis is also the author of Blue-Tail Fly, a book of poems that turns on the provocations of those on the outside of our histories of war, politics, and nation. Francis is the winner of the Rona Jaffe award, the Kresge Arts in Detroit fellowship, and Callaloo and Cave Canem fellowships. She is a past poet-in-residence at the Alice Lloyd Hall Scholars Program in Ann Arbor. Francis is a graduate of the University of Michigan's MFA program and she is the associate editor of Callaloo.
In this video, she describes poetry as compulsion. Below: her title poem.
Vievee Francis from Art X Detroit on Vimeo.
Horse in the Dark
Vievee Francis
Brown as a mule, I stomped
through the flocking geese
who thought themselves swans –
but a mule knows its opposite
and so did I. They were no swans.
A horse can be broken by such
beauty. A horse may follow it
down a slope that slices of its hooves.
Beauty, like a restless man in a tall hat,
a wandering boy with teeth white
as if he had never known meat,
or the score of water over stones.
I leapt up for the rain-cloud
shaped like a darker horse,
jumped a too-tall fence believing
a horse could be loved more
and ridden less. Until we fell
apart, the horse I was and I.
We who had prayed for a heaven
of toothless-grass and barley –
how did we untwine? When
did my long face pull itself back
into this flat form? When
did words replace neigh?
Two legs took my trot.
And I, freed of my horse-self
who lay dead to the greening world,
ran through the clover. On two legs
ran and ran –
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