Box of Blue Horses

Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award--“Lisa Graley’s strange and beautiful book-length poem, Box of Blue Horses, is unlike any other poem I have read and unlike the work of any other poet I know. The richness of her language somewhat suggests Hart Crane’s voyages among the adagios of his islands. But her words are more than merely beautiful.…With each of my readings of this book, Lisa Graley’s Blue Horses grew richer and more powerful, which is exactly what we demand and expect of the finest poetry.”—John Wood For all the people who have ever closed off or tamped down some essential part of themselves—imagination, a talent, a passion—and then wished to have that aspect “unboxed,” this book is worth examination. Here, in a cycle of 44 poems about a herd of blue horses and the persona’s quest to track them, poet Lisa Graley explores the crippling effects of stifling creative impulses as well as the tensions, costs, and joys involved in living an unfettered life. "Box of Blue Horses" is a meditation on the fear of creativity. But it is a meditation in the form of a story about magnificent blue horses, inspired, in part, by the blue horse paintings of Franz Marc. Stylistically, the volume is an experimental blurring of genres, having at its heart the musicality of lyric poetry while incorporating the complex characterization and narrative story arc you might find in a novel.

A native of West Virginia, Lisa Graley is an assistant professor at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette where she teaches English and humanities. She has published in Glimmer Train Stories, Water~Stone Review, and The McNeese Review. The Louisiana Board of Regents awarded her an ATLAS (Awards to Louisiana Artists and Scholars) sabbatical in 2009-10 for her work in fiction.