Cart Before the Horse: An Anthology of Poems

Is death long, you ask; is it very long? Death is only the one second, between forgetting and awakening. In this anthology of sixty-two poems, Patti Masterman puts the cart squarely before the horse-asking life's last questions first. God, death, love, and the strange luck of being alive are all taken up in a voice that is by turns reverent, heartbroken, and slyly funny. Here the universe is not out there but in here: hidden in the spaces between atoms, between heartbeats, between all the things we leave unsaid. A heart undergoes cryosurgery. A spider meets its end beneath a Bodhisattva's shoe. A mother dies, and the night grows long before the dead begin to speak. Arranged in seven movements-from the cosmos within us, through love's many weathers, to grief, wit, and song- Cart Before the Horse is a book for readers who want their poetry plainspoken but never small: poems to read at a bedside, at a graveside, or alone at the kitchen table when the house has gone quiet.