Nate Logan, Wrong Horse

 

At the end of a tough week, I treat myself to some curbside steak, broccoli, and brick of bread. I wait for the bill and see right into the restaurant. A hostess rolls her eyes so far in her head, I feel a little sick. Some child uses a red crayon with disturbing flourish. A slice of cheesecake is put in front of an elderly couple. I’m the only person in the designated to-go parking area. The wind nudges the car with a sock foot. (“Parking Lot”)

The second full-length collection by Wisconsin prose poet and editor Nate Logan, following Inside the Golden Days of Missing You (Magic Helicopter Press, 2019), as well as a small array of chapbooks (including one by above/ground press), is Wrong Horse (Chicago IL: Moira Books, 2024). I’ve been following for a while the curious trajectory of the American prose poem, one that appears to have been furthered quite prominently by the late Russell Edson [see my review of his posthumous selected poems here], a form that leans rather hard into what others might suggest as a very short or postcard story. There seem a handful of poets following that particular influence: Sarah Manguso’s early work, for example, or that of Evan Williams, Elisa Gabbert or Benjamin Niespodziany. Logan’s narrative prose poems, through Wrong Horse, might share certain elements of all of the above, but not necessarily the surrealist and cinematic elements of Niespodziany, or the theatrical gestures and impulse of Gabbert, yet the same elements of scene-composition remain. Logan’s approach, instead, offers a curious and even kinetic push against endings, refusing to provide those easy or expected landings. Logan’s poems offer a calm, almost unsettling sense of quiet, writing something slightly off in the narrative, unsettling the very foundation of the narrative; not in a surrealistic way, but something else, other. There is such a fantastic subtlety to the way Logan approaches each prose-block, each poem, a quietude that might allow inattentive readers to not fully appreciate just what it is his work provides. His poems put all those narrative parts into play, into motion, but stops just short of the implications, allowing the reader to fill in the rest. “To spend the equinox in a hammock,” he writes, to close the poem “The Home Stretch,” “wasting my life. Or not breaking the backs of mothers walking a Weimaraner. And there’s the mannequin again with an egg in its mouth.” As Logan wrote as part of a statement on prose poems last fall, for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics:

There are frequent stops when traveling by prose poem; for me, this is one of its unique charms, maybe thee charm that keeps me coming back. Unlike another poem that can move between a line that spans across the page and a zig-zag all within the same piece, I know, and the reader knows, the prose poem will start and stop, then start and stop again. Being invited to sit with sentences, poetic sentences in no particular hurry, is a pleasure. Furthermore, the tendency for the prose poem to wind around surrealism (neosurrealism?) is a nudge to the reader to stay with sentences longer—the associative leaps lend themselves to contemplation (this is a whole other essay). The “radicalness” of the prose poem still lies in its form, but the beat has changed. And when the poem does end, either at one paragraph or a few pages, if it goes especially well, the accumulation of sentences stirs a reader, which is what all good poetry should do (even still, Charlie, I didn’t mean to make your mom cry).