Breaking a Mare

Christina Thatcher grew up between a farm and a ranch house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She won a Marshall Scholarship to study in the UK and now lectures at Cardiff University. Her poetry and short stories have been widely published in literary magazines, including Ambit, Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Poetry Wales, The North, and The Poetry Review. She has published two earlier collections: More than you were (2017) and How to Carry Fire (2020). Christina has toured internationally, reading her work in the UK, USA, Canada, Costa Rica, Switzerland, and Romania.  She lives with her gardener husband, Rich, and their cat, Miso. christinathatcher.com

‘Sweeping Sonnet’ was longlisted for the 2023 National Poetry Competition.‘When the Knacker Man Visits the Barn’ was selected for the ‘2024 Poems on the Buses Exhibition’ in Guernsey.Christina was awarded a Literature Wales Writer’s Bursary, supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council of Wales, for the purpose of researching and drafting the early poems in this collection.This book offers a unique perspective for readers (i.e. the intersection of farm life, horse riding, rodeo, womanhood and ecological awareness); an authentic voice (i.e. as a poet and academic with experience of riding and farm life); and a feminist approach, investing girlhood, goodness, women’s work and silence.'What a precision feat this book pulls off. On the one hand, these are poems of sleek physicality – of clasp and bit and buckle and braid – with shrewd things to say about the tyranny of polish and perfection. At the same time, they’re intimately attuned to the charged spaces we occupy and the roles we perform within them, whether it be a rodeo arena, a haunted hayride, a school playground or an empty kitchen... I am, like one of her riders, lovestruck quick for all of it.' – Abigail Parry ‘An exceptional writer, a poet who refuses to stay quiet. Her speaker has galloped out of darkness, urging us now to consider: what has been breaking us, what is it that we can tame, what wildness can we harness?’ – clare e. potter'In Christina Thatcher’s vivid new collection, the farm offers wildness and wonder to a young girl, as she witnesses bodies broken and made strong again. Breaking a Mare shows us that the breaking can be part of the survival.’ – Rebecca Goss