Sandy Longhorn (Poetry) | Conway, AR

Sandy Longhorn is the author of three books of poetry, The Alchemy of My Mortal Form (Trio House Press), The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths (Jacar Press), and Blood Almanac (Anhinga Press). After ten years of teaching at Pulaski Technical College, where she directed the Big Rock Reading Series, Longhorn recently joined the faculty of the Arkansas Writers MFA program and the Department of Writing at the University of Central Arkansas. In addition, she co-edits the online journals Heron Tree and One and blogs at Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.

Books

Press & Reviews

“The Alchemy of My Mortal Form is fully imagined and richly worded, telling a journey of the body and soul through fever and sin to redemption—in need of just enough to make my way. How wonderfully Sandy Longhorn surprises her reader.”
—Carol Frost, Louise Bogan Award Judge

“I am struck by the immediacy of Sandy Longhorn’s new book, The Alchemy of My Mortal Form. From the opening surge of the book’s imperatives, the self, under stress, illness, and objectification, demands that we notice. And in the hands of this exceptional poet, the self is transformed into an expansion of our condition. Longhorn bears witness to the body’s transformation before, during, and after illness. Though her speaker says her aim is only to document the nicking of the vein, the radiant magic performed through her poetry parts the curtain and grants us a glimpse of our fullest capacity for empathy.”
—Oliver de la Paz

“The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths is a stunning collection of poems. With her gift for startling images and precise music, Sandy Longhorn converts the normally peaceful vision of the prairie into a place that perpetually threatens to turn innocence into a cautionary tale. In these poems, young girls discover haunting consequences for ‘refusing to mind.’ Disobedience transforms girls through underground language or the bright forgetfulness of poppies. In this landscape formed by elegy and glaciers, everything worshipped is dead or wounded, yet Longhorn’s imagination and lyricism resurrect these myths so you can ‘taste the light his body had foretold.’”
—Traci Brimhall

“These sly, beautifully crafted poems inhabit and haunt the heart-land. Sandy Longhorn is a poet with the gifts of observation and imagination. An original voice with a knack for telling tales.”
—Stuart Dischell

“Like good fiction, the characters in these poems feel alive and real even if they are cast in a world tinged in the mythic tones of the fairy tale. These are not the classic retellings of Grimms’ tales, in the tradition of Anne Sexton’s Transformations. Rather, this book is ‘born of the river and the black dirt,’ rooted in a Midwest landscape, written in the language of the prairie, ‘the raking teeth of the wind / scraping the tall grass into song.’”
—J.D. Schraffenberger for the North American Review.

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