Horse and Rider

Horse and Rider takes its title from a passage in the book of Exodus: “Sing unto the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has cast into the sea.” Melissa Range’s poems explore violence and power, particularly as those concepts relate to religion and to the natural world. Her mixture of free and formal verse is populated with warriors, weapons, animals, and figures from the Bible and mythology. In a galloping triptych of ancient and apocalyptic visions, these vigorous poems probe the recurring image of the horse and its sometimes troubled, sometimes loving relationship with its rider.

It’s distressingly hard to find new American poets best served by traditional prosody, by terza rima or by couplet rhyme. Hard, but hardly impossible. Melissa Range is one such poet, and her immersion in traditions—religious and regional, as well as metrical—has led to an exciting, disturbing, promising . . . first book. —Stephen Burt, The Believer

The play of sound in Melissa Range’s debut collection, Horse and Rider, is . . .ostentatious, canny, full of muscular stampedes and chipper twitter . . . She is a formalist with edge, not fully broken, champing the bit. --Andrew Osborn, Spoon River Poetry Review

In a singular and smart voice, Range speaks directly to the Western reader during a time of warfare; at the same time, she speaks to the long and bloody memory of our species and to any reader of any time or place. —Russ Brickey, Rain Taxi

The redeeming power of love, amid the causes and causalties of violence

Melissa Range was born and raised in East Tennessee. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a “Discovery”/The Nation prize, and a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her poems have app