One Woman-Horse Show by Jess Murrain
‘One Woman-Horse Show is both mythic making and investigative. The poems straddle the liminal and surreal with extraordinary boldness. Murrain contorts language and imagery to explore and document misogyny, queerness, race and identity with an elegiac pathos that is once delightful, engaging and emblematic.’ Malika Booker
‘Murrain’s poems work as a series of restless, strange expressions probing an ongoing malaise. In One Woman Horse Show she masterfully fortifies a world or condition loaded with precarity, wonder and argument. These are poems brimming with thought and feeling, that speak into the upside down mess, the inverse, surreal and unexpected.’ Anthony Anaxagorou
Jess Murrain’s writing glows bright with intimacy and elision, the push and pull our hearts recognise from any new and captivating entanglement. One Woman-Horse Show is an astute exploration of selves dawning in childhood and finding routes into a life woven with complications, of the work and toll of pushing back against smallness and shame. Joy and love mingle with profound loss. We see language in altered states, words moving like jazz in a poetics reclaiming ‘the right to chaos’. There is mischief here, a delicate balance at play, and always the sense of further stories unfolding behind the scenes. Murrain commands poetry with grace and defiance, evincing the confidence of a thrilling new voice.
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