There is a Horse in Me

Loud, vibrant, honest, deep reaching like gospel music, this collection leaves a horse in you. Patricia Starek's poems take you over from the very first line. Her poems are screams that thunder across space and time. They are delicate hand blown bridges connecting us to each other, raising the spirit, our wild animals. These poems dress like warriors to cross the border. They comfort, raise, stir, hold you...

-Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Author of We Are Not Wearing Helmets

There's A Horse in Me resonates with a raw and captivating beauty. Patricia Starek's verses brim with a vulnerable intensity in every line. She thunders across space traversing internal and external landscapes. Through her words, we understand her heightened awareness of paying attention to everything. In these poems she demonstrates this stance is not a deficit, but a superpower. She uses her keen sense of perceptions, as she inhabits being wife, mother, friend, educational advocate and poet. Patricia's unfiltered authenticity urges us to embrace all--from ethereal skies to the solid ground beneath our feet. She compels us to feel this exquisite thrumming. This collection isn't just read; it's experienced, a lyrical journey inviting us to marvel at existence and gracefully heed the call of everyone and everything, especially cumulus clouds, always those incredible cumulus clouds guiding our gaze skyward.

-Glenis Redmond, The Listening Skin

In her new collection of poems, New York poet Patricia Starek juxtaposes the daily struggles of parenting, "each choice/ a weight," against the blissful experience of motherhood, "He is compact joy with the drive of Zues/Tiny tincture of supreme curiosity." Her poems evoke the interplay between tenderness and pain, between silent emotions held close and "community glasses/ loud loud loud." Starek has given herself permission to leave the stable, allowing her readers access to a private emotional world, typically "stabled/ always separated from the child." Through narrative verse and urban chorus, she masterfully captures an oscillation between poignant delight and biting heartbreak: "Taxi too early/Little one on my leg." The ebb and flow of passion is at times as large as loss of life, or as small as a cracked pistachio. Those who share the ride will cross rivers between pieces of the self, find footing beyond traditional spaces, ache in the tears on a tablecloth, and reflect on the grinding curve of a beautiful carousel.

-Paula Friedrich, Author of Bird Intuition