Earth Striders by Kathleen McKinley Harris

Organically beautiful and vibrant with details, Earth Striders celebrates a young girl who, as she grows into a woman, learns about the world and about herself. Fear, love, tragedy and humor inhabit these poems alive with memorable women and men who raised horses, trained them, loved and lost them. These stories transcend both time and the rural Vermont where most are set to teach us enduring truths.

–Ray Hudson, author of Moments Rightly Placed: An Aleutian Memoir

Still longing for a real horse to pull as her grandfather burns the old buggy frame, a young, horse-crazy girl grows slowly out of her child world. One can hear “the hooves beat the hard road: and feel “the rhythm of the walk or trot” in these lines that are “like riding waterflow,/an effortless gait easy to sit for a day-long ride.” But “what is the world/I’m growing into?” she mourns in Kathleen Harris’s rich and sentient sequence of poems.

–Nancy Means Wright, author of Acts and Balance and The Shady Sisters

Harris’s poems “breathe out vapors” of a pastoral Vermont revivified in the tradition of Robert Frost. Richly narrative, they amplify the jangling, clattering, swishing rhythms and vernacular of yesteryear’s farm life — the strawberry roan “strider,” or the sinewy spunk of barn girls when there’s “no more mown and tedded grass to rake / into cocks nor stubble to slash bloody their bare feet.” When nature bucks and the wounds are raw, this poet’s grace, humor and lyrical agility keep us tethered to lines tenderly bred.

–Sara London, author of The Tyranny of Milk