Apollinaire
and Other Horses
(2022)
“What if the French symbolist poet was a 4-year-old gelding? (he is, and his favourite treat is carrots). Horses apparition at decisive historic moments, before there was apple pie – sometimes they don't even know they are a horse, even when they are depicted that way in drawings, mid-flight. A surrealist survey of equine influence on the folkloric imagination.”
Sam Riviere (editor)
A poetry chapbook published by If a Leaf Falls Press
20 pages.
Limited ed. of 100
Design by O. Tong
Archived at the National Poetry Library, University at Buffalo Library, University of Chicago Library, Edinburgh College of Art, and the Scottish Poetry Library
Stocked by Good Press (Glasgow), Typewronger Books (Edinburgh), the London Review Bookshop, and Books Peckham
Review by Richard Marshall:
What do you want from poetry these days? Simulation, imitation, possession & metamorphosis would be enough to be going on with if you ask me. And deadly carrots, dragon bites, the fiction of the imaginary vessel, of doubles and whosoever doesn't hang. (Let’s be clear, not psychopathological, parapsychological mumbo jumbo but rather Paul Valery’s quotidian, ceaseless insidiousness.)
Torset is a poet caught in the act. In this sequence of miniaturist works she divides and simulates, and begins by offering both the certainty and uncertainty of objects … ‘ a cow is something like a horse…’ with the prosthesis of a drawing as if to prove the first poems’ fathomable gap: ‘ it just doesn’t look right.’ Packed into this tight little event is the promise of a system, a palpable medium (she’s all paper, ink, pencil and each one of those, as she draws and draws our attention to them, extends our realization of what prosthesis might be) that leaves the reader immediately exhilarated by the promise of a project whose fortunes might end up looking neither right nor upright, but yet nevertheless as an outlined apparatus for a poetry that both invites and then refuses the mind, exploits and discharge of the reader, but which in a cosmic sprezzatura sews humans and horses back together. It’s just like when Hercules captured Diomedes’s mare despite him knowing too much theology not to be aware of the trap. We’re in a trap but that’s the point of reading poems: we become the residue that in the end is burned. So what do I want from my poets? I want them to do that to me.
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Full article: 3-16am.co.uk