There is Room in a Horse for the Whole Boy

Praise for Barbara Saunier and There is Room in a Horse for the Whole Boy

For the poet, among the most difficult experiences to explore and create is the paradoxical fusion of the opposing, contradicting, disruptive feelings we wake to every morning. And yet Saunier also affirms that we must wake each day and humanely walk into the the staggering experience of being human. In her unpretentious sonnet “Goose Down” Saunier blends wonder, shock, grief, joy, mystery.… They cannot be separated. All Saunier’s perceptive poems evoke and embody the constancy of our contradictory inner experience. But to be confronted by these courageous poems is in the end to be strengthened.

—Jack Ridl, author of All At Once, Losing Season, and Practicing to Walk Like a Heron

[Using] form, language, and humor, Barbara Saunier puts us right into…rural living. These poems hold no secrets, instead they offer stunning revelations of life, death, the bovine cry for her calf, the opossum that needs killing. This is a book that honors the callused hand, the whole of the horse,…the laundered bed sheets, toasted cheese sandwiches, and the barn swallow’s “rookie mistake” leaving it dead but “no less worthy,” in this poet’s imagination, than “fine porcelain.”

—Joy Gaines-Friedler, author of  Secular Audacity and Capture Theory

“The sense of tone and place in this collection [is] strong and distinct. The stark sense of longing mixed with the specific details work well to captivate the reader. Each poem presents beautifully written imagery that represents a deep connection with the natural world…. Readers highlighted the poems “Of Which Little Boys are Made” and “Carry Me” for their uniqueness. Both pieces do a magnificent job of illustrating the level of craft in which Barbara Saunier operates. “Goose Down” gave us a touching moment that highlighted the beauty that can be found in death and the circle of life.”

—Summit Series of CMICH Press

With an almost heady immersion into the granular details of the world around her, Barbara Saunier brings her whole heart to natural processes and finds beauty and transformation in our “living soil.” From meditations on the carcass of a barn swallow “worthy of…wrought gold,” a weasel “genie” on ice among the frozen peas, and the heart-rending rendering of a horse into the glue that will enable the voice of the violin, the poems in There Is Room in a Horse for the Whole Boy extract “sacraments of decay” and richly rewarding song.

—Terry Bohnhorst Blackhawk, author of One Less River and Maumee, Maumee