Ghost Moose - MARGO TAFT STEVER

Margo Taft Stever’s chapbook, Ghost Moose, was published by Kattywompus Press (Somerville, Massachusetts) in 2019. Ghost Moose focuses on the present and and future during the ongoing sixth extinction, one of the greatest mass extinctions in the history of the earth, and the only one precipitated by humans. Ghost Moose is available for purchase on the Kattywompus Press website.

Margo Taft Stever’s The End of Horses shows an important poet working at the height of her powers. “Treehouse” opens with lines that describe Stever’s poetry, in both subject and taut form: “Something about roots, / bone-like, tenacious, / that grip the moving ground.” Stever has always painted indelible portraits of the natural world—its violence and vulnerability, as well as its beauty. In this book, readers will see a deepening of her long eco-poetic project, and of her interest in the human animal, the tender and flawed human family alive on fraught Earth.

—Suzanne Cleary
Author of Crude Angel, BkMk Press of Missouri-Kansas City

The poems in Margo Taft Stever’s The End of Horses mourn our irreversible ecological change, in elegiac turns and odes to the beauty that remains. The speaker’s past is recast through a political lens, turbulent and haunting in retrospect. Stever’s ecopoetry emphasizes our enmeshment with tragedies we have created. Powerful, terrifying, and gorgeous, these poems are, above all, fearless.

—Denise Duhamel
Author of Second Story, University of Pittsburgh Press

Margo Taft Stever’s “‘Nothing about you lacked/ intensity,’ Margo Taft Stever writes in a poem addressed to her dead mother. The same could be said about the poems in Stever’s new book, The End of Horses. Whether directing her attention to the natural world, her own past, or the confounding aspects of society, her taut phrasing and incisive imagery are always invigorating, even (or perhaps especially) when her lyricism becomes tinged with a sense of unease—to the point, sometimes, that the images begin to feel like omens. The urgency becomes particularly acute in the poems about animals and their plight at the hands of humans, as she both records and honors ‘the almost gone, the forgotten.’”

—Jeffrey Harrison
Author of Between Lakes, Four Way Books

Six decades following her untimely death, Marilyn Monroe remains a muse. The actress and poet continues to inspire each generation’s dreams, imagination, art, and resilience. This collection runs the gamut with poems depicting her childhood sexual abuse, mental illness, dazzling and brilliant film career, support of civil rights, alleged and fabled relationships, and death. Monroe’s impact on our culture—and on each of us individually—is captured in this fascinating compilation.

—Gary Vitacco-Robles
Marilyn: Behind the ICON podcast; ICON: The Life, Times & Films of Marilyn Monroe, volumes 1 & 2; Cursum Perficio: Marilyn Monroe’s Brentwood Hacienda

I Wanna Be Loved by You—the perfect title for a renewed Marilyn coursing through the dreams of poets who still see the promise and the woe of her life, imagining themselves into what it was like for her to look for love and get so much of it that was not enough. They look for her blessing. They want to complete the life she left for all of us to imagine.

—Carl Rollyson
Marilyn Monroe Day by Day: A Timeline of People, Places, and Events; Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress; Female Icons: Marilyn Monroe to Susan Sontag