The End of Horses, poetry by Margo Taft Stever

Publication Date: April 15, 2022

Paperback, 80 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-04-2

$22.50 retail, $18.00 from publisher

In the title poem from this new collection from Margo Taft Stever, she writes “from the end / of the time zone” where “nothing survived / after the horses were slaughtered,” a catastrophe for which no one knows whom to blame, but “The generals / and engineers pucker / and snore on the veranda.” Stever thus offers up a fable of man-made ecological disaster, and in every sense her writing in this volume is fabulous. It is also in every sense the work of a mature writer, one who has lived long and witnessed much, and who has mastered her craft, here placed in the service of the environment. She devotes much concern to animals – including a discourse on beavers – but her primary subject is human, and her purpose to provide us with cautionary tales on the necessity of ethical living. One long poem describes the accidental (and ironic) death of a relative in a cold war era fallout shelter, closing with the observation that “He had no known enemies” – except, that is, for folly , recalling Walt Kelly’s famous observation that when it comes to the environment, we are our own worst enemies. While it may be too late to avoid the consequences of our past environmental sins, Stever shows us a possible way forward into more harmonious and humane living in a world where there is still much beauty.

ERRATUM: On the copyright page and back cover, the title of Linda Butler’s photograph Wind River Mustangs is incorrectly identified as White River Mustangs. This was the fault of the book designer, and Broadstone Books regrets the error.

Praise for Margo Taft Stever & The End of Horses

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

The poems in Margo 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

“Nothing about you lacked/ intensity,” Margo 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

About the Author

MARGO TAFT STEVER’s full-length poetry collections are Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press, 2019), which was shortlisted and received honorable mention for the 2021 Eric Hoffer Award Grand Prize, and Frozen Spring, Mid-list Press 2002 First Series Award for Poetry. Her latest of four chapbooks is Ghost Moose (Kattywompus Press, 2019). Her poems have appeared in literary magazines including Verse Daily, Plant-Human Quarterly, Cincinnati Review, Rattapallax, upstreet, Salamander, West Branch, Poet Lore, Blackbird, Poem-A-Day, poets.org, Academy of American Poets, and Prairie Schooner. She co-authored Looking East: William Howard Taft and the 1905 U.S. Diplomatic Mission to Asia (Zhejiang University Press, 2012). She is currently an adjunct assistant professor in the Bioethics Department of the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. Stever also teaches a poetry work¬shop at Children’s Village, a residential school for at-risk children and adolescents. She is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and founding and current co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. (www.margotaftstever.com)