There Is Room in a Horse for the Whole Boy is a lyrical and deeply affecting collection by Barbara Saunier that explores the sacred interstices between human and animal, memory and body, grief and grace. With a voice at once tender and unflinching, these poems move through barns and bedrooms, fields and family kitchens, tracing the invisible threads that tether us to the earth and to each other.
Structured in four sections-Hide & Seek, Fences, Choir, and Sanctuary-the book ranges from elegies for winged creatures and domestic losses to mythic invocations of Gaia and Argiope, spinning a cosmology where children imagine themselves into horses, glue sings with the ghost of a gelding, and frogs praise the road with delirious urgency. Whether contemplating the hands of Amish boys, the geometry of a labyrinth, or the silent prophecy of roadkill, Saunier's poems offer a world alive with moral and sensual complexity.
Her language is rich with tactile detail and formal grace, weaving metaphysical reflection into the pulse of rural life. Like the title poem, many pieces meditate on bodily shelter-how one being might carry another in intimacy, grief, or play. Always attentive to transformation, this collection reveres the ordinary as a site of mystery and insists that wonder and sorrow often dwell side by side.
Barbara Saunier's voice is one of fierce attentiveness, humor, and spiritual weight. There Is Room in a Horse for the Whole Boy is a collection to read slowly and return to often, a profound and resonant debut from a poet whose compassion reaches into the very muscle of language.
There Is Room in a Horse for the Whole Boy is a lyrical and deeply affecting collection by Barbara Saunier that explores the sacred interstices between human and animal, memory and body, grief and grace. With a voice at once tender and unflinching, these poems move through barns and bedrooms, fields and family kitchens, tracing the invisible threads that tether us to the earth and to each other.
Structured in four sections-Hide & Seek, Fences, Choir, and Sanctuary-the book ranges from elegies for winged creatures and domestic losses to mythic invocations of Gaia and Argiope, spinning a cosmology where children imagine themselves into horses, glue sings with the ghost of a gelding, and frogs praise the road with delirious urgency. Whether contemplating the hands of Amish boys, the geometry of a labyrinth, or the silent prophecy of roadkill, Saunier's poems offer a world alive with moral and sensual complexity.
Her language is rich with tactile detail and formal grace, weaving metaphysical reflection into the pulse of rural life. Like the title poem, many pieces meditate on bodily shelter-how one being might carry another in intimacy, grief, or play. Always attentive to transformation, this collection reveres the ordinary as a site of mystery and insists that wonder and sorrow often dwell side by side.
Barbara Saunier's voice is one of fierce attentiveness, humor, and spiritual weight. There Is Room in a Horse for the Whole Boy is a collection to read slowly and return to often, a profound and resonant debut from a poet whose compassion reaches into the very muscle of language.
