“‘Horse’ inhabits a moment of metaphorical thinking—not metaphor as embellishment to thought, but as thought, as a means of knowing. The sudden realization that I was being used by someone registered as feeling like a horse being ridden, while maintaining a watchfulness about this circumstance and rider, as horses do. The poem speaks from this subjected subjectivity, not (yet) harmed, but awake to a complex unfolding. I wanted the lines to tumble down the page like a Jacob’s Ladder, one hinged to the next, simultaneously orienting and disorienting, the way meaning cascades through us in moments of sudden recognition.”
—Lisa Olstein