Slowly, Slowly, Horses

Julianne Buchsbaum

“Julianne Buchsbaum’s Slowly, Slowly, Horses is a quietly furious book. her language is as rich and eerily fascinating as bending down to look closely at something decomposing. But this is a different sort of nature poetry—her landscape is “a pasture of taints,” and her close observation of language, of course, is close observation of the human mind. There is something of Wallace Stevens in her precision, her incredible diction, and in the way her descriptions are simultaneously direct and mythical.” —Matthew Rohrer

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ISBN: 9780967266879

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 9780967266862

Format: Hardcover

Scarred

Clouds flake off piece by piece above the rough
ice-collared snow, the slags of light in soil.

The splay of tree-crowns spurring and furling
up into the sky. Black boughs in glacial ache.

Husks of bark, of shivered wood moored on ice;
fringe of it receding from pools of blue,

the pools having taken the sheen of sky
down to their depths. Palest of white ridges

infolding, asphalt bastioned with furrows
along the field of it. Scarred with dead blades,

the world withdraws in white before me.
Frost’s multi-angled effacements—nothing

made fast is what I have: the atrophy
of leaf and sap, the waste and feed of it.

About the Author

Julianne Buchsbaum received an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was a recipient of the Paul Engle Fellowship. She published poems in numerous magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Harvard Review, and The Iowa Review. She was the author of two books of poetry, Slowly, Slowly, Horses and A Little Night Comes.

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Reviews

“For Buchsbaum, observation of the natural world evokes all the complexities of a life lived in complete realization of our human faults and tendencies, our need for isolation in the face of our need for contact… There is a knowledge of isolation, and an admiration of the ascetic monk in these poems that is haunting and richly attractive.” —Gulf Coast