Autobiography of Horse: A Poem

by Jenifer Sang Eun Park

The co-winner of the inaugural Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize.

A frenetic tour of a splayed self writing through an equine obsession.

I became obsessed. I swallowed myself whole and turned into a knot. I couldn't undo myself, so I crawled inside a horse. Inside the horse I hardened, and then broke. The horse collected the pieces and glued me back together. I unraveled the horse and stitched it back together. The horse trampled me and I burned through its hooves.

Autobiography of Horse documents Jenifer Sang Eun Park's obsessive and parasitic relationship with the horse. At one point a muse, the horse is transformed into a vessel used to travel the volatile hollows of memory, selfhood, depression, and loss. To make this journey, the horse mutates from an image into a companion, a projection, and a reflection that, as Wallace Stevens wrote in "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words," injects imagination with "the strength of reality."

Presented in lyrical prose, diagrams, photos, and conceptual excerpts from imagined texts, Autobiography of Horse pieces together a true story spurred by a tormented, pathological, and, ultimately, redemptive imagination.

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, Paperback

Published April 5, 2019

Reviews

[AP Dwivedi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m very new to poetry and do not have a degree in literature. Likewise my illiteracy probably prevented me from understanding/appreciating Park’s poetry. She plays with form and structure, and it’s like there’s another layer of semiotics, another language, there to unpack. Needless to say it’s a language I don’t understand.

So I’m left with my raw aesthetic sensibilities, and don’t see how horses are interesting enough to be vehicles for all of these different layers of life/death. She also does this thing many times where she repeats the word “horse” a few dozen times, and in the absence of knowing how to read that, I’m left with the semantic satiation of a very ugly sounding English word. (Say “horse” to yourself and tell me you don’t sound like a seal).

[Josh L · Rating 5 out of 5]

I realize it’s only day 5 but this is the best poetry I’ve read this month. Horse horse horse horse horse horse horse horse horse horse horse horse horse horse horse.

[Ryan Bollenbach · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gripping Horse of a long poem, a gripping long Horsepoem from beginning to end. Structurally, it reads like a braided essay similar to books like Bluets. In contrast to Bluets, however, the threads are a little bit more muddled and a little bit more bodily. The language is a little more savory: "The Red Horse / lures Anastasia / & Sandman into his eye. / He Starves them / into two threads / one black / one brown."

Or, another way to think of it:

The speaker starts by eating the Horse. The speaker gives herself to the Horse to be eaten. What manifests from there is the Horse in its many forms. Some of them are real, and some of them are surreal. All of them are keenly rendered.

And kudos on the book design/quality as well--full color illustrations and various diagrams make the Horse all that much more lively.

[Bibliophile10 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Curious, challenging, human. This poem asks much of the reader, yet is also generous with the reader--art at work.

[Simone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Autobiography of Horse documents the author’s obsessive and parasitic relationship with the horse. Told through beautiful prose, poetry, and images the horse is transformed from muse to vessel that helps us explore feelings of loss, depression, and memory. .
I really enjoyed this read. The writing had a fever dream quality to it that allowed for the baring of the author’s soul. She presented her relationship to the horse in such an open and honest way that I, as the reader, was sucked in turning page after page trying to understand this relationship. I don’t think this is something I would haves picked up for myself if I wasn’t sent it. So thank you so much to the folks over at @gaudyboys for putting this on my radar and helping me embark on such a unique reading experience!

[Cyril Wong · Rating 5 out of 5]

Autobiography of Horse is deliciously pathological. ‘In the horse, I saw the possibilities of my own body’, the author confesses. As readers or bewildered voyeurs, we receive a guilt-free pass in galloping to cantering alongside the poet’s spirit animal—neither anima nor animus, as Jung would define it, but something in between and altogether beyond—across a layered terrain of centrifugal anecdote, centripetal self-questioning, and orgiastic, metaphorical dressage.

[Shaelyn Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Autobiography of Horse is a book that is so brave, & that will make you both braver & better for reading it. It is a declaration of honesty, independence, & interdependence, a new iteration of the poetic & all its possibilities, what Park unpacks as Wallace Stevens’ Possible Poet, as a sense of self. It’s an admission & accomplishment of the near impossible ability to look directly at the thing one fears most. The horse Park interrogates lives in us all, if only we should be so humbled, insightful, imaginative, & courageous enough to see it for what it is, for who really are. Park allows that we are all possible poets, if only we allowed ourselves to look this clearly, to reach this deeply, & be our most vulnerable imagination incarnate. Read this book; you owe it to your future self.

[Ja'net · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars.

[Not Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry.

[Izzy · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the strangest, most self-assured books I've read in a while.

[kacie · Rating 5 out of 5]

horse horse horse horse
Horse Horse Horse
horsehorsehorsehorsehorse

“I realize no horse knows I’m writing about the horse. We can’t meet in the place of words and pages. This is an inherent problem I find in whatever I decide to write. Words are too mutable to be sturdy bridges. Curiously, this lack of constancy is what interests me in writing neigh neigh neigh through no horse can hear this neigh neigh neigh or even understand this neigh neigh neigh or even hear this neigh neigh neigh as mimicry of their own neigh neigh neigh”