Poetry

The Smoke of Horses

In this fascinating new collection by longtime poet Charles Rafferty, evocative prose poems insert strange and mysterious twists into otherwise mundane middle-class scenarios. With wonderful intelligence and imagination, these compact, revelatory poems show us what is possible when we jettison accepted devices of thought for methods that are stranger, and much truer.

“Futility”

My glances keep hitting her like arrows tipped with moths, marking her with dust she has merely to brush away.

Praise for The Smoke of Horses

“Charles Rafferty has given the prose poem a new identity. Poem after poem, in his wonderful The Smoke of Horses, is lucidly mysterious. It’s as if Charles Simic got together with Robert Hass to discuss a day in the life of, say, Rene Magritte or, better yet, Milton Avery. In other words, there’s a wonderful intelligence at work here that becomes a sensibilty, a quality that normalizes the odd, the strange, and makes the life it depicts as surprising and as humorous as, well, life itself.”—Stephen Dunn

“One after another, always surprising, the transcendent short tales and meditations in Charles Rafferty’s The Smoke of Horses are sometimes lyrical and ecstatic, sometimes funny and self-deprecating, sometimes wistful, but always beautifully precise in their odd and individual depiction of our very human everyday life. The narrator may compare himself to a grackle, the grackle’s song to a rusty gate, and the reader takes wing along with him. A pleasure to read.”—Lydia Davis

Publication Date: October 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-942683-47-6

FormatPaperback

Publication DateOctober 10, 2017

ISBN978-1-942683-47-6

$16.00

Out of Stock

About the Author

Charles Rafferty is the author of 14 poetry books and chapbooks, most recently The Appendectomy Grin (BOA, 2025), A Cluster of Noisy Planets (BOA, 2021), The Problem With Abundance (Grayson Books, 2019) Something an Atheist Might Bring Up at a Cocktail Party (Mayapple Press, 2018), and The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017). His stories have been collected in Saturday Night at Magellan’s (Fomite Press, 2013) and Somebody Who Knows Somebody (Gold Wake Press, 2021).

His poems have appeared in Gettysburg Review; The New Yorker; O, The Oprah Magazine; Ploughshares; Prairie Schooner; Rhino; and The Southern Review. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. Currently, he co-directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College and teaches in the Westport Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Sandy Hook, CT.