Mare's Nest, Holly Mitchell
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Jewish Book Council "Recommended Reading"
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The latest installment in the Sarabande Series in Kentucky Literature, Mare’s Nest explores a Kentucky horse farm in its turbulent beginnings.
From Kentucky native and Brooklyn-based poet Holly Mitchell, Mare’s Nest troubles the meaning of a racehorse, in particular the broodmare and the foals she carries. Reaching from the photographic experiment of Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion” to Patti Smith’s album Horses, Mitchell touches upon history, dreams, Southern family stories, and queer adolescence in the early aughts.
Colloquially referring to a muddled situation or an illusory discovery, the term “mare’s nest” can also refer quite literally to the soft depression left by a horse lying in grass. And so the idea of a “mare’s nest,” in all of its linguistic potential, serves as the central focus for Holly Mitchell’s meditative debut.
Additional Info
Holly Mitchell is a poet from Kentucky, now based in New York. A winner of an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, Holly received an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU and a BA in English from Mount Holyoke College. Holly’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Streaming (an online publication by Fence), Afternoon Visitor, and the Lambda Literary Poetry Spotlight, and elsewhere.
PRAISE FOR MARE’S NEST:
"Springing from her years growing up on a horse farm in Kentucky, the memoirlike free-verse poems in this first collection from the Amy Award–winning Mitchell are powered by visceral images related to breeding and raising horses."
—Library Journal
“The poet’s knowledge of and confidence in her subject are deep and clear, as are the observations, questions and discoveries. The writing is as taut and rippling as a thoroughbred in the first turn of a race she’s sure to win.”
—Henry Hughes, New York Journal of Books
"Whether drawing attention to sounds—'of the warble fly / nested under skin, / making a whistler / of the riding horse'—or depicting a horse who 'appears almost / elegant, ewe-necked / but fescue-footed,' these poems immerse readers in the world of Kentucky horse breeding, a bodily world of afterbirth and syringes, of 'Regu-mate / with cracked corn.'"
—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Poetry Foundation's "Harriet Books"
"I devoured Mitchell’s intimate debut collection.... Unfolding in two parts, this delves into, of course, horses and family, names, and growing up on a farm. Beyond the gorgeous cover, gorgeous poems await."
—Connie Pan, Book Riot
"Her poems are a lilting meditation on parenting as a conduit for active choice."
—Elisheva Fox, Jewish Book Council "Recommended Reading"
"This one’s for the horse gays! It’s about Kentucky, queer adolescence in the early aughts, and yes HORSES!"
—Autostraddle, "Close Out National Poetry Month by Preordering Queer Poetry Books"
“‘The camera can make a fool of a realist,’ says the speaker in the opening poem of Holly Mitchell's debut collection Mare's Nest. This claim—equal parts provocation and invitation—prepares the reader for the vivid portraits that follow: part family lore, part coming-of-age, part naturalist study. Human intimacy is translated into the language of the stable, the pasture, the horse farm; the precarity of a mare's life speaks to human strength and fragility. The beauty and ecstasy here arise from language that feels newly coined, never-before-heard. In these spare poems, vulnerability and a radical openness to the other—both human and animal—sing without sentimentality.”
—Catherine Barnett, author of Human Hours
"Written in the cadence of a mad gallop, the poems are held back, then set free to expand and unravel. Like a horse at the starting gate—readying for the race, its heart, electric, its body pulsing with terror and exuberance—Mitchell’s Mare’s Nest is the poetry collection we have all been waiting for.”
—Cynthia Cruz, author of Hotel Oblivion
"Full of both ache and praise, Mare’s Nest is a calling, a conjuring, a blessed airborne gallop embodying all the love and complications of home. This collection stuns, stunts, envelops, rises, and arrives trailing with shelled green beans, the gulping of creek water and the pregnant sigh and heat of longing, searching, finding exactly who we are and where we belong."
—Ellen Hagan, author of Blooming Fiascoes
“Mare’s Nest is precise and haunting, spoken with the finest grit of red clay between the teeth. Plainly stating the necessities and brutalities of horse breeding, here you will look into the 'near opal' eyes of a moonblind horse, witness what’s known as 'a red bag birth,' when a dam presents a placenta before her foal. At the same time, Holly Mitchell turns her unflinching gaze to her family and to Kentucky itself—to osage oranges and snap beans, tornadoes and tobacco barns rotting back into the earth. Distilled down as the finest bourbon and just as warmly burning, these poems are rendered to their essentials, stripped of stereotypes and sentimentality, ‘trying to turn / & face everyone / where they’re coming from.’”
—Nickole Brown, author of Sister
“I can’t remember the last time such compelling poetry was made out of a subject so intensely specific— Nick Flynn’s Blind Huber comes to mind, or Thomas Lynch’s Skating with Heather Grace. Not only will you learn a lot about horse placentas, but you’ll be dropped into the intimate dailiness of a Kentucky farm and a family, with Mitchell’s beautiful and bittersweet specificity as stark and gripping as Elizabeth Bishop’s. And there’s a lexicon at the end! This is a book whose subject is often the past but whose place is firmly with us in the present.”
—Matthew Rohrer, author of The Sky Contains the Plans