Description: It illuminates the ways in which we all are relegated to cells or boundaries, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.
Brief description: Randall Horton's past honors include the Bea Gonzalez Poetry Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, and most recently a GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction for Hook: A Memoir. The author of numerous books, he is a member of the experimental performance group Heroes Are Gang Leaders, which received the 2018 American Book Award in Oral Literature. He is associate professor of English at the University of New Haven.
Review Quotes:
Take a thing or two that you're not and that you want not to be. Add salt in a wound and make that thing or two the only things the world sees. Make that not-what-you-are your mirror. Play it out over a century or three and you'll understand something about this tradition. It's not the classical route to wisdom (or is it?). Randall Horton's poems testify to 'a box reluctant / not to be a box, ' testify that reckoning with the terms of imprisonment is the key to whatever can be unlocked. He focuses on what happens to life, to time, to flesh and spirit, when 'the [I] in me no longer lives' and 'the collective (we) / is no better.' These poems refuse to testify to the façade. Instead, scripted 'not with breath / but breath's imagination, ' through them we can learn that whatever lives can be made here will entail all 'the bad & terrible beauty just beneath the living.'
--Ed Pavlic