Wrong Horse

Author: Nate Logan

Publisher: Moria Books (2024)

The second full-length collection by Wisconsin prose poet and editor Nate Logan, following Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019), as well as a small array of chapbooks, is Wrong Horse. Logan’s narrative prose poems, through Wrong Horse, might share certain elements of all of the above, but not necessarily the surrealist and cinematic elements of Niespodziany, or the theatrical gestures and impulse of Gabbert, yet the same elements of scene-composition remain. Logan’s approach, instead, offers a curious and even kinetic push against endings, refusing to provide those easy or expected landings. Logan’s poems offer a calm, almost unsettling sense of quiet, writing something slightly off in the narrative, unsettling the very foundation of the narrative; not in a surrealistic way, but something else, other. There is such a fantastic subtlety to the way Logan approaches each prose-block, each poem, a quietude that might allow inattentive readers to not fully appreciate just what it is his work provides. His poems put all those narrative parts into play, into motion, but stops just short of the implications, allowing the reader to fill in the rest.