Emotional Support Horse by Claudine Toutoungi

This tragi-comic, or comi-tragic grief journal blends loss and low vision into poems that issue in startling joy. Emotional Support Horse tracks the course of a lived bereavement intensified by sight loss and eco-stress. But wit is not only an element of style, it is a state of imagination, and it leads out of dark depth into the region of joy.

A woman longs to metamorphose into Nicola Walker in a cop car, or a Hungarian Viszla or just to find an equal footing with her doctor. Personal and planetary fractures blur in the vivid, dreamlike pages that turn and speak to anyone who has stood at that crossroads of confusion and rupture. In part soulful, in part self-help, the poems veer between droll and despairing, their swings from high to low and back again reflecting the self adrift on a choppy sea. A self, however, never alone but accompanied throughout by a host of other species.

From earthworms to wolfhounds, flamingos to Konic ponies, the world of Emotional Support Horse glints with light and life, plumbing sorrow’s depths even as it stumbles upon solace.