Reading a Nate Logan poem is like playing with a jack-in-the-box. In fact, most of the poems in Wrong Horse consist of a single square of prose, a half page or so, in a clean-carved box. Inside these boxes, Logan doesn’t so much pile images as adjoin them like the gears of a fabulous machine and invite his reader to turn the lever. In “Ducks and How to Make Them Pay,” the figures proceed like character actors in a Wim Wenders montage:
“A group of teens, noses stuck in their Bibles…The local expatriate…The barista with the ice scraper tattoo…I feel ill-prepared for revenge.”
His images tend toward the quotidian, but in arranging them makes them strange and desolate. We see this in the poem called “Poem,” when “The deer pile up on the stretch of highway around Wis Dells. At night the headlights from our rental blur in drying orbs.”
The joy of a jack-in-the-box, of course, is not whether something will pop to surprise you, but when, and what shape it will take when it does. Will it be a smirking clown? Some carnival harlequin? Or will it be, as in Wrong Horse’s “Crockpot,” “My embalmer friend…Samantha, on one crutch.”
Such surprises seem baked into Logan’s identity as a poet. They are referential, but refer to events we have not experienced, and people we have never met. And yet, they ring true, and they add dimension to the small, moving spaces which constitute the setting of so many poems in Wrong Horse.
Logan has a keen relationship to place, and travel, and the people who fill the spots through which he passes. In the final piece of the book, “Some Horses,” we see Logan in an unfamiliar place:
“Our vacation ended in Amish country, no closer to an immaculate barn. I was a shadowy man on a shadowy planet. You, minutes from hurling earbuds out the window, simmered with an ancestral rage. We cut our losses at the coffeehouse. The folk singer’s smile was nonchalant and severe while he murdered the classics. “We are drifters, I tried to tell you, handsome,” you said, your fingers galloping away with some horses.”
The speaker finds himself far from home, yet surrounded by familiarity. The folk singer’s classics, even the platitude of “cut[ting] our losses,” remind us we are never so far from comfort as when confronted with that which should seem comfortable and isn’t. And yet the strangeness, the “fingers galloping away,” the interjection of “I tried to tell you, handsome,” bring some element of comfort, even if fleeting, even if fleeing.
Wrong Horses is full of jokes without punchlines, punchlines without jokes. It employs a poetics somewhere between James Whistler Americana and Beck’s Mellow Gold. To Logan, life seems a series of inside jokes confabulated between best friends in that secret language only best friends speak in private, in the car, with the radio quiet.
Wrong Horses is available in paperback or as a free pdf from Moria Books.
John Leo is an author and game designer. He is the writer of This is Not a Place of Honor (Night Gallery Press, 2024) and The Names of Ancient Wars (Ghost City Press, 2021), and the co-writer of the chapbook Soft Summer (Ghost City Press, 2024). His work has appeared in the anthology A Flame Called Indiana: New Writing from the Crossroads (Indiana University Press, 2023) and elsewhere. His tabletop design credits include Star Wars: Unlimited and Wolves of Mercia.