Sea Legs by Johnny Horton

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Johnny Horton’s debut collection, Sea Legs, asks us to reflect on the ways we learn to survive in an unsteady and often unsafe world. Moving through subjects like gun violence, family trauma, religious existentialism, or fleeting romance, the poems question whether we construct the myth of ourselves through lived experience and hardship, or if who we are is largely inherited, shaped by forces beyond our control.

The associative nature of Horton’s poetry pulls you through a range of unexpected connections, moving from naturalist facts like “The paper nautilus loses his penis while making love,” to irreverent moments, like psychoanalyzing Julius Caesar’s Oedipal dreams or pointing out the drag show on display in the Sistine Chapel.

Across twenty-three poems, Horton offers a mind in flux, never fully certain of what it believes. The collection’s underlying angst is tempered by his exploration of Roman antiquity, Greek mythology, American pop culture, and science. By the end of Sea Legs, you come away with a heightened awareness of the natural world, deeper empathy for human struggle, and a sharper sense of how unstable the idea of the self can be.

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The world as filtered through Horton’s deep understanding of history is a fabulous place, and these poems are wonderful in their revelations. The poems in Sea Legs pull off that wondrous feat of creating a portrait of a brain in action. In these inventive, funny, elegant poems, a portrait of a self-aware thinker emerges, the poet in the world, making associations of myth and history and memory, weaving them into his poems in ways that reveal connections that are both unexpected, and, once made, instantly recognizable.

–Rebecca Aronson, author of Anchor, winner of the 2024 Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry and the Philosophical Society of Texas Poetry Award

With its sly wit and keen perception, Sea Legs makes a fine sauce for tenderness as well as grief, offering poems that disarm, reveal, and steady the heart with unpretentious elegance.

–Randy Sue Coburn, author of Owl Island

Opening Sea Legs is like entering a cathedral in a foreign country: an immediate sense of familiarity and shelter you forgot you had. In pages where ancient meets modern, where travelers, locals, devotees, and heretics all gather, Horton’s work is novelty that remains novelty. It invites you to traverse centuries, laugh at modernity, and jump over some dire ‘No Trespassing’ signs, all with a sigh of relief.

–Sophia Bruscato, author of Primeira Pessoa

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