Love Me with the Fierce Horse of Your Heart by Gabrielle Grace Hogan

“I gave up on breath / a long time ago, / with all its melodrama,” Hogan proclaims early in a poem about a queer awakening from the 1999 film, But I’m a Cheerleader. And yet, breath and melodrama sing through the poems in Hogan’s Love Me with the Fierce Horse of Your Heart, as if this failed abnegation were a kind of music. Hogan’s poems are poems of doubt, longing, and tenderness all subsumed by a Sapphic undertow where both the pleasure and pain of queerness become inscrutable. “I can’t bear you a child,” Hogan writes, “Not from this flesh to yours / but I’ve never wanted another of me less—though, I suppose /// I could stand a world with multiples of you.” The way Hogan refuses to fill the space of her poems so that her beloveds may inundate them makes one question the tragedy of magnanimity and the readiness for sacrifice so abundant in narratives of queer survival. Although well-acquainted with the sadness of yearning, Hogan’s poems are, above all, a clarion of love in its heaviest and most resilient beauty, teaming with all of her most precious artifacts: from Natasha Lyonne’s gravelly voice to Rococo paintings to Jodie Foster’s used underwear. The inscrutable passion of Hogan’s poems will leave the reader wondering, “Are we headed to a wedding or an orgy?” The answer, as always, is in the poems.
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Gabrielle Grace Hogan received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin through the New Writers Project. Her work has been published in CutBank, TriQuarterly, Poetry Northwest, DIAGRAM, and others. She has worked as the Poetry Editor of Bat City Review, and as the Co-Creator/Co-Editor of You Flower / You Feast, an anthology of work inspired by Harry Styles. Her first chapbook, Soft Obliteration, was published by Ghost City Press in 2020. Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, she now lives in Austin, Texas.