Horse-Minded

The wide expanse of the Western landscape predominates Horse-Minded by Suzette Marie Bishop, opening tough vistas for human and spiritual experience. "Suzette Bishop's collection of poetry, Horse-Minded, investigates the many permutations of place, real and imagined, inhabited in the present or past, escaped to during illness, specifically, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Poems suggests some of the ways to travel to these places via the imagination or on horseback or on an imaginary horseback ride. Too, the book's title suggests a way of thinking that allows you to endure life’s obstacles, a kind of horse sense." CFIDS Association of America, Bulletin Board "Equestrian aerialists and auto-crash survivors populate Suzette Bishop's built environments along with ocelots and octopus...She gives us our exploited natural world as if it were a new horizon." -Lori Anderson Moseman "With horses, some of the most exciting movements--breaking to the gallop, the flying change, and the layback--are the ones that briefly imbalance the creature, defying its high center of gravity. The mystery of how far language can lean without crashing down parallels the mystery of horses. Laredo poet Suzette Marie Bishop's Horse-Minded is a marvel of changing, off-balance movements. The key is motion, speed, and rhythm." Barrett Warner, Concho River Review "Many of the rhetorical strategies Texan poet Suzette Marie Bishop employed in her previous collection, She Took Off Her Wings & Shoes, winner of the May Swenson Poetry Award Series, appear again in her latest volume, Horse-Minded, Poems. She bifurcates experience, the inner and outer worlds, and then reattaches the two realities without comment, side by side, achieving more poignancy and sometimes even humor than any direct approach could achieve. 'Pulling at the Center,' 'Thorn Forest: Refuge or Refuse,' 'Postcards,' 'Horse-Minded,' the title poem, and 'So I Rode There,' the final, long poem, are all successful examples of splicing together multiple realities. The perspectives must stand on their own, undercut or supported by adjacent material. While these poems might be considered experimental and look so on the page, by virtue of a different typography to render each reality, nevertheless, they are fairly accessible." Maryanne Hannan, The Innisfree Poetry Journal "This is food for the feast. Especially interesting is the use of multiple typographies to articulate meanings. Vivid use of the page and a constant weaving and reweaving of story/tone/story show what is exceptional about this poet. She plays with words and lets meaning mysteriously evolve." Grace Cavalieri, The Washington Independent Review of Books Available at: http://www.ebookwoman.com/ http://www.bookpeople.com/ Or please email me to purchase a copy (publisher sold out).