Breaking a Mare by Christina Thatcher PRE-ORDER
Published 3rd April 2025. Available for pre-order.
It's summer and the flies are back and your mare is wild-eyed and uneasy tossing her head as she trots, jolting as trucks arrive in the driveway, you keep kicking, you want to canter: come on girl, let's go Breaking a Mare is an investigation of silence, goodness and girlhood. It invites readers into the barn, the sawdust mill, the rodeo arena. These poems expose the hard work women do on farms, the loss of rural landscapes and the role death can play in these spaces. They ask what it means to be good in the face of physical, emotional and ecological threat. Ultimately, these poems want to know what breaks us and what makes us stronger. Christina Thatcher grew up between a farm and a ranch house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She won a Marshall Scholarship to undertake two MAs in the UK, after which she completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Cardiff University, where she is now a lecturer. Her poetry and short stories have been widely published in literary magazines, including Ambit, Butcher's Dog, Magma, Poetry Wales, The North, The Poetry Review and more. She has two previous poetry collections with Parthian Books: More than you were (2017) and How to Carry Fire (2020). Christina has toured internationally, reading her work in the UK, USA, Canada, Costa Ri-ca, Switzerland, and Romania.
It's summer and the flies are back and your mare is wild-eyed and uneasy tossing her head as she trots, jolting as trucks arrive in the driveway, you keep kicking, you want to canter: come on girl, let's go Breaking a Mare is an investigation of silence, goodness and girlhood. It invites readers into the barn, the sawdust mill, the rodeo arena. These poems expose the hard work women do on farms, the loss of rural landscapes and the role death can play in these spaces. They ask what it means to be good in the face of physical, emotional and ecological threat. Ultimately, these poems want to know what breaks us and what makes us stronger. Christina Thatcher grew up between a farm and a ranch house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She won a Marshall Scholarship to undertake two MAs in the UK, after which she completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Cardiff University, where she is now a lecturer. Her poetry and short stories have been widely published in literary magazines, including Ambit, Butcher's Dog, Magma, Poetry Wales, The North, The Poetry Review and more. She has two previous poetry collections with Parthian Books: More than you were (2017) and How to Carry Fire (2020). Christina has toured internationally, reading her work in the UK, USA, Canada, Costa Ri-ca, Switzerland, and Romania.
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