BAREBACK RIDER, a poetry chapbook by Margo Taft Stever
Publication Date: May 15, 2025
Paperback, 32 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-12-3
The title of Margo Taft Stever’s new chapbook suggests daring, danger, and exhilaration, and all are evident in her poetry. One found poem quotes a bookseller’s note advising that a book she purchased was “rescued from oblivion on the streets / of Brooklyn,” and Stever’s verse provides a similar service, rescuing memories and, in the process – just maybe, if we’re lucky – all the world and all of us from everyday oblivions. Like the woman in her closing “Epitaph” who “died / trying to save / a bug,” Stever knows that the smallest actions may have great consequences, and that such actions are always within our reach. “The door was just an old excuse / for you to walk through” – what a delight to step through that door, and to take this thrilling ride, with her.
Photographs from noted artist Lynn H. Butler grace the cover and frontispiece.
Praise for Margo Taft Stever & Bareback Rider
The poet is an animist, living in the skin of the creatures she loves and animating the place she loves—our natural world on the verge of destruction and mass extinction.
—Sarah Arvio, author of Cry Back My Sea
Margo Taft Stever’s Bareback Rider continues her focus on climate change, her problematic family, and the majesty of horses, including her beloved horse Chimney Sweep and their serious jumping accident. With mastery she addresses a brother who dies from a morphine overdose, a sister who plies her with cough syrup, and an unstable manic-depressive and alcoholic mother who inflicts unending trauma, among others. Within this dreamscape, a couple have sex in the window display of a high-end furniture store; creatures, but not dogs, poke their elongated noses from paper bags; and the bellies of children are distended by hunger. In this stunning collection, the reader’s usual presumptions are disrupted, encouraging us to rethink all we take for granted.
—Susana H. Case, author of If This Isn’t Love
In the poem “Slow Train at Night,” Margo Stever describes the engine as “Vacuuming the trout / and stars from the motionless / river.” It’s one of many instances in her collection Bareback Rider that give the reader pause—the absorbing sound of it—the emptiness after. Stever is an accomplished equestrian; you can tell from the way she insists that she and the horse must become one: “she is part / horse. They are both seers / of the path.” For the uninitiated, this ride through the landscape of family history can be daunting. It requires holding on, trusting implicitly the poet/rider who knows the difficult jump that is coming up next.
—Mervyn Taylor, author of Getting Through: New and Selected Poems
About the Author
Margo Taft Stever’s full-length poetry collections are The End of Horses (Broadstone Books, 2022), winner of a 2022 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award and a NYC Big Book Favorite in Poetry; 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 previous 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 an adjunct assistant professor in the Bioethics Department of the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. Stever also teaches a poetry workshop at Children’s Village, a residential school for at-risk children and adolescents. She is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and was recently reappointed to their board of directors. She is also the founder and current editor of Slapering Hol Press.
Publication Date: May 15, 2025
Paperback, 32 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-12-3
The title of Margo Taft Stever’s new chapbook suggests daring, danger, and exhilaration, and all are evident in her poetry. One found poem quotes a bookseller’s note advising that a book she purchased was “rescued from oblivion on the streets / of Brooklyn,” and Stever’s verse provides a similar service, rescuing memories and, in the process – just maybe, if we’re lucky – all the world and all of us from everyday oblivions. Like the woman in her closing “Epitaph” who “died / trying to save / a bug,” Stever knows that the smallest actions may have great consequences, and that such actions are always within our reach. “The door was just an old excuse / for you to walk through” – what a delight to step through that door, and to take this thrilling ride, with her.
Photographs from noted artist Lynn H. Butler grace the cover and frontispiece.
Praise for Margo Taft Stever & Bareback Rider
The poet is an animist, living in the skin of the creatures she loves and animating the place she loves—our natural world on the verge of destruction and mass extinction.
—Sarah Arvio, author of Cry Back My Sea
Margo Taft Stever’s Bareback Rider continues her focus on climate change, her problematic family, and the majesty of horses, including her beloved horse Chimney Sweep and their serious jumping accident. With mastery she addresses a brother who dies from a morphine overdose, a sister who plies her with cough syrup, and an unstable manic-depressive and alcoholic mother who inflicts unending trauma, among others. Within this dreamscape, a couple have sex in the window display of a high-end furniture store; creatures, but not dogs, poke their elongated noses from paper bags; and the bellies of children are distended by hunger. In this stunning collection, the reader’s usual presumptions are disrupted, encouraging us to rethink all we take for granted.
—Susana H. Case, author of If This Isn’t Love
In the poem “Slow Train at Night,” Margo Stever describes the engine as “Vacuuming the trout / and stars from the motionless / river.” It’s one of many instances in her collection Bareback Rider that give the reader pause—the absorbing sound of it—the emptiness after. Stever is an accomplished equestrian; you can tell from the way she insists that she and the horse must become one: “she is part / horse. They are both seers / of the path.” For the uninitiated, this ride through the landscape of family history can be daunting. It requires holding on, trusting implicitly the poet/rider who knows the difficult jump that is coming up next.
—Mervyn Taylor, author of Getting Through: New and Selected Poems
About the Author
Margo Taft Stever’s full-length poetry collections are The End of Horses (Broadstone Books, 2022), winner of a 2022 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award and a NYC Big Book Favorite in Poetry; 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 previous 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 an adjunct assistant professor in the Bioethics Department of the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. Stever also teaches a poetry workshop at Children’s Village, a residential school for at-risk children and adolescents. She is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and was recently reappointed to their board of directors. She is also the founder and current editor of Slapering Hol Press.
Publication Date: May 15, 2025
Paperback, 32 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-12-3
The title of Margo Taft Stever’s new chapbook suggests daring, danger, and exhilaration, and all are evident in her poetry. One found poem quotes a bookseller’s note advising that a book she purchased was “rescued from oblivion on the streets / of Brooklyn,” and Stever’s verse provides a similar service, rescuing memories and, in the process – just maybe, if we’re lucky – all the world and all of us from everyday oblivions. Like the woman in her closing “Epitaph” who “died / trying to save / a bug,” Stever knows that the smallest actions may have great consequences, and that such actions are always within our reach. “The door was just an old excuse / for you to walk through” – what a delight to step through that door, and to take this thrilling ride, with her.
Photographs from noted artist Lynn H. Butler grace the cover and frontispiece.
Praise for Margo Taft Stever & Bareback Rider
The poet is an animist, living in the skin of the creatures she loves and animating the place she loves—our natural world on the verge of destruction and mass extinction.
—Sarah Arvio, author of Cry Back My Sea
Margo Taft Stever’s Bareback Rider continues her focus on climate change, her problematic family, and the majesty of horses, including her beloved horse Chimney Sweep and their serious jumping accident. With mastery she addresses a brother who dies from a morphine overdose, a sister who plies her with cough syrup, and an unstable manic-depressive and alcoholic mother who inflicts unending trauma, among others. Within this dreamscape, a couple have sex in the window display of a high-end furniture store; creatures, but not dogs, poke their elongated noses from paper bags; and the bellies of children are distended by hunger. In this stunning collection, the reader’s usual presumptions are disrupted, encouraging us to rethink all we take for granted.
—Susana H. Case, author of If This Isn’t Love
In the poem “Slow Train at Night,” Margo Stever describes the engine as “Vacuuming the trout / and stars from the motionless / river.” It’s one of many instances in her collection Bareback Rider that give the reader pause—the absorbing sound of it—the emptiness after. Stever is an accomplished equestrian; you can tell from the way she insists that she and the horse must become one: “she is part / horse. They are both seers / of the path.” For the uninitiated, this ride through the landscape of family history can be daunting. It requires holding on, trusting implicitly the poet/rider who knows the difficult jump that is coming up next.
—Mervyn Taylor, author of Getting Through: New and Selected Poems
About the Author
Margo Taft Stever’s full-length poetry collections are The End of Horses (Broadstone Books, 2022), winner of a 2022 Pinnacle Book Achievement Award and a NYC Big Book Favorite in Poetry; 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 previous 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 an adjunct assistant professor in the Bioethics Department of the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. Stever also teaches a poetry workshop at Children’s Village, a residential school for at-risk children and adolescents. She is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and was recently reappointed to their board of directors. She is also the founder and current editor of Slapering Hol Press.