Poetry. A collection twenty years in the making, THE BRIGHT RED HORSE--AND THE BLUE-- is a meditation on longing, love, and heart break as they manifest in lyric form. A series of thirty- one unusually sculptural pieces, the poems are, by turns, seductive, ecstatic, unyielding, and resigned. As a subject, the poems' speaker is both fulsome and bereft, searching, through the penetrating vision of her lines, for the relief of an unsustainable devotion. While formally efficient, the series is emotionally profligate, and the reader is left by the end of the collection with the knowledge that the speaker has been irrevocably transformed. Accompanied by an Afterword elucidating the unusual process by which the series came to be, THE BRIGHT RED HORSE--AND THE BLUE-- reproduces like no other book the tender discipline of heartbreak.

In THE BRIGHT RED HORSE--AND THE BLUE-- Katy Lederer invites us to an intimate encounter with the lyric, to 'enter it / Directly--' and to 'work it out / Our own way--.' And though spare of image, it's its rhythm that strikes the visual cortex. I'd like to read this book in a desert I've never been to.--Sara Nicholson

Katy Lederer's THE BRIGHT RED HORSE--AND THE BLUE-- is a book about pushing, to speak and to breathe and to feel, in the face of a longed-for listener's refusal. 'We begin--with-- / With a person--, ' these vivid, stuttering poems insist, formulating passages of extraordinary expressivity that seem puffed, hotly, as against a glass. Unpublished for more than two decades, this collection brings us to an exact lived moment, a time at which the fearful symmetry of words is tirelessly and forthrightly framed by a young writer.--Lucy Ives

Although the poems in THE BRIGHT RED HORSE--AND THE BLUE-- were initially composed over twenty years ago, it is difficult not to read the series as a response to the present moment--and I do think poems and books sometimes wait to meet the moment in response to which they were composed--in which the United States has fractured and continues to fracture. That fracturing, in part, begins with and in language--it begins with and in response to language that has retreated so far from verifiable content as to be outside direct and even comprehensibly indirect communication. THE BRIGHT RED HORSE--AND THE BLUE-- documents, among other things, language re- discovering and re-constituting itself, and as a result, the poems are fresh in a way few poems are--they make new ways, themselves, with and in the reader's understanding, new channels for communication, and thus, much as a switch completes a circuit, they make whole.--Shane McCrae