ABOUT THIS BOOK

In the next chapter of the Cave Canem/Northwestern University Poetry Prize, we enter the poetic world of Vievee Francis. Bold and skilled, Francis takes us into the still landscapes of Texas and the fluid details of the African American South. Her poems become panhandle folktales revealing the weight of memories so clear and on the cusp. Her creative tangle of metaphors, people and geography will keep the reader rooted in a good earth of extraordinary verse.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

VIEVEE FRANCIS is the author of Blue-Tail Fly: Poems (2006). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in several periodicals and anthologies including Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, Best American Poetry 2010, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She was the 2009–2010 Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Hall Scholars Program and is the recipient of a 2009 Rona Jaffe Award, a 2010 Kresge Artist Fellowship, and Cave Canem fellowships. She is an associate editor for Callaloo.

REVIEWS

“The poems in Vievee Francis’s Horse in the Dark are revelations—of memory, of dust, of the cotton and marginalia strung together to make a history.” —Adrian Matejka, author of Mixology

"So many suitors.... Who can resist Vievee Francis? ‘Horse in the Dark,’ just like ‘Blue-Tail Fly’ before it, attests to Francis’s graceful state of dignified self-possession informed by sorrows, brutal violence, and hidden desires. Francis’s desire lines are complicated. Ever authentic and observant, she adjures us... to follow her... to put down our bow, take up our lyre, and sing. ‘Horse in the Dark’ is the long version of Philip Larkin’s line “What will survive of us is love.’" —Scott Hightower, author of Part of the Bargain and Self-evident

"...an electrifying portrait of danger and hardship in a mostly rural-landscape in West Texas." —National Book Critics Circle

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Smoke Under the Bale

Transfiguration

<EPI>

I 4

Amarillo

Still Life in Yellow with Browns and Some Blacks

The Plain of Sudden Circumstance

How Easily Memory is Colored

Bull Snake

Gun of Wishes

The Cowboy’s Son

The Hiding Place

The Conjunctions

II

Horse in the Dark

I Will Be There Forever and Was Never There At All

De rerum natura

Marred

Peaches

Fishing Hole

Poulter’s Measure

The Rule of the Forest

Still Life with Another Grandfather, Masons, and a Pie Under the Bed

Eulogy With Feast and a Tall Black Man on Bass

Still Life in Amarillo #2

Pig Head in a Plastic Sack

III

Before Crushing the Heads of Her Sleeping Boys She Heard the Breeze A-Whispering

Killing Jim Mitchell

Say It, Say It Any Way You Can

Blue Haunt

Tug

Anteater

Sugar and Brine

Cane, Sweet and Dusty as a Teat

IV

The Beach Still Has its Dangers

Water, While Not Love is So Similar

At the Lethe I Met My Mother and She Did Not Know Me

The Seahorse’s Lament

On the Way to Round Rock

Firmament of Glass

Still Life with Summer Sausage, a Blade, and No Blood

Memory and Plow

A is for

Ars Poetica

Still Life in White with Free Men and Dust

To Be Pegasus

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