My Skies of Small Horses - Paperback

In My Skies of Small Horses, there are "no bone-hangers on which to drag your dress around." From one misread book title (Alice Notley's Mysteries of Small Houses) springs a collection of poems that gather horses, sheep, brassieres, Bukowski, fedoras, cotton balls and cotton swabs and cotton underwear under one rickety roof. Follow Celine as she sidles through each gamine room in search of a simple solution.

Cati Porter knows that the domesticsphere is a space full of knives, that a human is a zoo animal, andthat a lover is someone who holds your hair while you vomit. Withplenty o' nods to Plath and looking-glass Alice, the language in MySkies of Small Horses is like a steep spiral staircase with a velvetbannister, tricky and lush and twisting. It's a poetry of the"haunted, the unhung and moonsung, the run and the con."

-- Arielle Greenberg, author of Slice and My Kafka Century and co-editor of Gurlesque: the new grrly, burlesque, grotesque poetics

Cati Porter's My Skies of Small Horses revels in a domestic space that twists and morphs until a dystopic world isrevealed. The speaker persists through various trials with a feralpower that wreaks havoc on the ordinary. With language that is bothdaring and dazzling, she lets her survivalist mode kick in and laysclaim to this tumultuous realm where, "beneath the table, beneaththe chairs, /small horses take shelter: // I cross the field./I clap myhands./I want to see them run." A brilliant and vital collection!

-- Molly Bendall, author of Under the Quick and Ariadne's Island