If There Are Horns by Francesca Preston

Like a collection of magic spells, Francesca Preston‘s evocative debut chapbook If There Are Horns imparts to us an ancient and imaginative Earth-wisdom. These haunting poems hum with Preston’s sense of animism, love of nature and regard for the stories of her Ligurian ancestors. Through Preston’s words we witness how we consume, and are consumed by, the nature that surrounds us; yet, this mutual consumption occurs in uncanny ways—a beloved’s skull, eaten by time, becomes a honeycomb, bits of viscera and blood are stitched into sausages, the moon becomes a piece of candy and then a sweet lychee. It is an utter joy and a delight to wander in the dream garden Preston has grown for us, to partake of its rich and darkly revealing fruit.

–Dara Yen Elerath‘s collection Dark Braid (BkMk Press) won the 2019 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry and was longlisted for the Julie Suk award. Her work has appeared in journals such as The American Poetry Review, AGNI, Poet Lore, Green Mountains Review, Boulevard, Plume and elsewhere. She earned her MFA at the Institute of American Indian Arts and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Francesca Preston‘s stunning debut collection transfuses softly, beautifully, potently. Her words paint and sound two Prestons: one dry like a skeleton, the other dense and juicy like the insides of pomegranates. I am left hearing “the sound of fingertips / hitting a jug / that once carried water.”

–Naoko Fujimoto was born and raised in Japan. Her poetry collections are Where I Was Born, winner of the editor’s choice by Willow Books (2019); Glyph:Graphic Poetry=Trans. Sensory by Tupelo Press (2021); and four chapbooks. She is a RHINO associate editor and Tupelo Quarterly translation editor.

In If There Are Horns, by Francesca Preston, bodies and landscapes are deeply intertwined, glinting against each other and finding new nuance. Many of these poems explore a California far from the beaches and sand of stereotype and delve into a quieter, complicated space of drought and folktale. There is a deep connection to the natural world here: dust, viscera, and maps. This is a beautiful collection.

–Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco is the author of Various Lies (Finishing Line Press), and an editor for the journals One Sentence Poems and First Frost.