The debut poetry collection from Holly Mitchell, Mare’s Nest , explores a Kentucky horse farm in its turbulent beginnings. The title refers to the idiom—“a complex and difficult situation, a muddle” and “an illusory discovery”—as well as an image: the depression a horse leaves after lying in the grass. These poems trouble the meaning of a racehorse and in particular the broodmare and the foals she carries. Reaching from the photographic experiment of Muybridge’s Horse in Motion to Patti Smith’s album Horses, Holly Mitchell touches upon history, dreams, Southern family stories, and queer adolescence in the early aughts.

In the Vermont countryside of 1846, a mystery looms when a wandering artist visits town after town where pets and livestock have disappeared. Full-color illustrations.

Taken in by a near-alcoholic artist and a jaded academic, a young Dominican girl in Brooklyn's Fresh Air Fund program explores the contrasts between her inner-city life and her hosts' privileged world and finds her realities powerfully shaped by her relationship with a horse.