AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HORSE: A POEM
by Jenifer Sang Eun Park
978-0-9828142-4-6
$16.00 / Paperback / 5.5" x 8.5" / 90 pages
Gaudy Boy, April 6, 2019
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Distributed by Asterism & Ingram

Co-winner of 1st Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, selected by Wong May

Paris Review Staff Pick

Featured on Poetry Daily

Honorable Mention in the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in Creative Writing: Poetry

About

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.  

Jenifer Sang Eun Park was born in Denver, CO. She earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Alabama and is the author of the chapbook, When the Horse Lights the Night (Essay Press). She lives in Tuscaloosa and teaches at the University of Alabama.

Praise

“The horse inhabits the poet . . . the way Kafka’s Gregor Samsa found himself morphed into a beetle. It is . . . the diary of young poet—the making of a particular one with a unique sense and sensibility. . . . The vision, if nightmarish, is broad and bold, never narrow or confining. . . . Above all, it stands alone. This is an original [that] won my heart.”
—Wong May, author of Picasso’s Tears

“Memoir, history, myth, fiction, song—Jenifer Sang Eun Park’s poem gallops through its genres with fearsome and thrilling force. The voice here is brutal, intimate, smart as a whip, and above all wholly authentic. . . . This unique, perpetually surprising, and utterly convincing poem that will start that horse inside you running.”
—Joel Brouwer, critic and author of Off Message

“Here is a lyric documentary of the . . . human-horse-human psyche, ‘the who that has been pulling the what of me through a burnt field.’ It takes a commodious multi-genre and multi-voiced poem full of shifting texts and figures, photos and histories, to chart this phenomenological territory. It takes a thoroughly wild imagination. And heart-stopping phrasing and narratives, violence/love/hope in the crosshairs…. Autobiography of Horse is a riveting page-turner. A dazzling debut.”
—Roin Behn, author of Quarry Cross, The Yellow House, and Horizon Note.

“A mesmerizingly obsessive book. The poet’s obsession with HORSE in all its history, energy, grace, suffering, and beauty gradually yields to a reluctant but deepened knowledge of self and the complexities of family history. ‘Like a tug-of-war, the more I write, the more of the rope I gain, and the closer the horse gets to me.’ The read is a ride, full of obsessive documentation, visuals, quotation, and self-scrutiny. An odd and wonderful first book full of courageous persistence.”
—Hank Lazer, author of Slowly Becoming Awake (N32)

“Tristram Shandy’s enigmatic ‘hobbyhorse’ opened the door for theoretical (and theatrical) metaphor. Jenifer Sang Eun Park expands the metaphor in this searching hybrid text. Energetic and evocative, the author explores language as a Trojan horse, unpacking emotional layers to reveal an alternate consciousness in a unique, informative reimagining of the epic poem.”
—Jeffery Cyphers Wright, author of Blue Lyre