A Ride on The Torturer’s Horse
Poems by Howie Good

Reviewed by Erin McKnight

recycled karma press, 2009

Charged as a beast of burden, The Torturer’s Horse breathes raw, merciless prose from nostrils intent on dispersing the fog of despair that has settled over a battleground littered with the corpses of purpose, civility, and progress.

Mounted as commander on his steed, Howie Good orders primitivism and civility into battle. Within a self-assured collection that manages to skirt the trappings of cocksureness, Good’s tropes serve as weaponry sharpened by a marching prose that cannot, will not, quell the growl of a distant and primordial cadence. Yet, the horse careening through the collection’s “Devastated Regions” doesn’t hinder reader understanding or interest, for each of the seven harnessed poems is comprised of the same biological elements responsible for humankind’s gruesome and fruitless evolutionary war: flesh and bone. From some of the titles alone—“Self-Help,” “The World at War,” “In the City of Bad Dreams,” and “Anomalies”—it is evident that Good intends to ride directly into hostile engagement as he directs and buffers combat.

Yet, as with any prolonged war, atrocity is the true victor—the leveler of humanity. In the evolutionary drift, however, from simple to complex, from ancient to modern, culture will flourish. Good’s rendition of brutality’s beauty marries visual art with sonance as a reward for those readers wearied by a prolonged state of human strife. The collection’s melody, then, is somber, yet also forceful; feels brutal, yet is deeply affecting. Ferocious in its sensory effect, the collection’s namesake poem, “Arpeggio for the Torturer’s Horse,” sounds a cacophony of uneasy discord, a disquiet that rings in readers’ ears like a gunshot fired so close that its discharge actually splits silence:

Now, as the orchestra tunes up, animal-like grunts
pour into the street from the high, dark windows

of the concert hall, and the few people passing
at this late hour, their eyes on the ground, quicken

their steps toward home.

Not all of Good’s ordinary soldiers are capable of retreat, however. For these lost souls, the din of combat will assail future dreams. In “The World at War,” one such innocent participant—a female neighbor—finds herself “crawling on [her belly]/for the shelter of the pine trees,” only to return from the protection of the woods to be “poked in her side” with an old farmer’s shoe.

This pointlessness is further developed, celebrated, even, in “A Discourse on Method.” The intrinsic human restlessness embodied by a “lonely diner” somewhere in anywhere-America constitutes the true social warfront. The banality of a smiley face scrawled on a check and the table-or-booth decision is rendered inapt by the dead flies that lie under the cake holder’s dome. The serial killer movie, lulling travelers who are going somewhere they will recognize yet have never seen, proves equally inane in the shadow of a Seneca reference.

Indeed, it is the subject of slumber that Good bridles as the true weapon of torture. The people, “sick with thought,” who toss all night may do so not because they are troubled by a “cold and dark . . . [internal] rumble,” but because the “horrible goggles” of the nose-diving pilot in their dreams forms a reflective, yet ultimately impenetrable surface for their screams. It seems there is no waking from Good’s collection of exquisite nightmares.

It is, however, when his cowering woman in the field chooses to “stand up and shout into the sky” that the heaps of rags littering the city’s bad-dream doorways rise up and fill out into people recognizable by “the same name.” It is this portrayal of the targeted neighbor, mired in a discordance that lines the undersides of Good’s post-apocalyptic adaptations—“Kant was fond/ of English cheese and Hobbes had/ a predilection for playing tennis/ and singing in his bedroom”—that makes The Torturer’s Horse a worthwhile read. The chapbook’s transportive power rests in the hope that the territory being galloped away will not always be war torn and recognizable only as absurd, incongruous, or ancient.

For, somewhere between the regions of past and future a typewriter key is missing. Good’s readers will unwittingly search his seven skirmishes for the question mark, but only when they actually drape “untanned hides” over their “hunched and narrow shoulders” as compensation will the Remington upright’s key dislodge. Resulting from the friction of primitive hide against refined skin—advanced through Good’s tactical and strategic prose—this question mark will tumble through a fog no longer dense enough to conceal the torturer’s horse, or silence its nostril-flaring rhythm.

Visit recycled karma press on the web at http://recycledkarmapress.synthasite.com/.

Read Cynthia Reeser's interview with Howie Good in this issue.

Erin McKnight is a Scottish writer now living in Dallas, and is Fiction Editor for Prick of the Spindle. Her writing has been widely published online and in print, in venues including flashquake, Ginosko Literary Journal, and PRECIPICe. Her short nonfiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and inclusion in W.W. Norton’s The Best Creative Nonfiction, Volume 3. Erin holds an MFA in creative writing with a specialization in fiction, and is currently at work on an MA in literary linguistics. 

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