Overview

There Is Room in a Horse for the Whole Boy is Barbara Saunier's deeply rooted, often startling collection of poems. With humor, precision, and unflinching clarity, she places the reader inside the textures of rural life: the callused hand, the horse in its full strength, the barn swallow's rookie mistake. These poems move between elegy and celebration, weaving grief and wonder, shock and joy, into moments that affirm the staggering, contradictory experience of being human. The collection has been praised for its courage and craft. Jack Ridl writes, ""All Saunier's perceptive poems evoke and embody the constancy of our contradictory inner experience. To be confronted by these courageous poems is in the end to be strengthened."" Joy Gaines-Friedler notes, ""These poems hold no secrets; 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."" From the horse rendered into violin glue to the frozen weasel in the peas, Saunier extracts what one reviewer called ""sacraments of decay"" and turns them into richly rewarding song. The result is a book of strong tone and place, filled with beautifully wrought imagery that connects the reader to the natural world and the inevitabilities of death, renewal, and change.

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9781968226039

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Reviews

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

Author Information

Barbara Saunier grew up in West Michigan, and wrote her first poem at the age of six - which she then gave to the family dentist, who kept it in her file until he retired. She took up writing poetry again several decades later, along the way supporting herself operating a solder pot on an assembly line, decorating furniture, life modeling, and free-lance writing- eventually picking up degrees from the University of Michigan and Western Michigan University. Her work has been published in many journals and reviews; it was also honored with first place in The MacGuffin 16th National Poet Hunt and in several other local and regional competitions. After teaching at Grand Rapids Community College for twenty-seven years, she is now retired - from teaching, from farm life, from horses and riding dressage. But she still drives a stick shift and does not color her hair.

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