Horsepower : Poems

Winner of the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, chosen by Natasha Trethewey.

Priest?s debut collection, Horsepower, is a cinematic escape narrative that radically envisions a daughter?s waywardness as aspirational. Across the book?s three sequences, we find the black-girl speaker in the midst of a self-imposed exile, going back in memory to explore her younger self?a mixed-race child being raised by her white supremacist grandfather in the shadow of Churchill Downs, Kentucky?s world-famous horseracing track?before arriving in a state of self-awareness to confront the personal and political landscape of a harshly segregated Louisville. Out of a space that is at once southern and urban, violent and beautiful, racially-charged and working-class, she attempts to transcend her social and economic circumstances. Across the collection, Priest writes a horse that acts as a metaphysical engine of flight, showing us how to throw off the harness and sustain wildness. Unlike the traditional Bildungsroman, Priest presents a non-linear narrative in which the speaker lacks the freedom to come of age naively in the urban South, and must instead, from the beginning, possess the wisdom of ?the horses & their restless minds.?
 
 FROM "RODEO"
 
The four-wheeler is a chariot. Horse-wraiths
Kicking up a plume of spirits in the dirt behind us.
Her arms kudzu around my middle. Out here,
 
In the desert, everything is invisible.
Only the locusts? flat buzz gives
Them away. Everything native & quieting
 
Perennial & nighthawk black
As we ride through: the cowgirls,
The witch & the water sky-mirror-split,
 
The severity of squall lines. Also, the lips
Parting air like lightning & the girl
Blowing bubbles?in each one
                                                a rainbow.