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A genre-bending collection of dramatic monologues shining a light on the anxious, self-directed gaze that defines contemporary consciousness.
Borrowing stylistic elements from the prose poem, faux memoir, online diatribe, and philosophical investigation, the twenty-five dramatic monologues in Spencer Gordon’s genre-bending collection shine a light on the anxious, self-directed gaze that defines contemporary consciousness. CEOs lose their obscene wealth in lurid hellrealms; an aspiring writer reassembles a personal history out of fragments from the 2000s; police cadets receive a curious crash course in transduction and ethics; the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and Deepwater Horizon oil spill reveal the immanent sublime.
Ranging from ironic and furious to pleading and melancholic, Gordon’s speakers exist in a world of social media think pieces, hot takes and take downs, fake news and distorted facts, steeped in pop culture and its discontents. They are real people, intimate as kin. But they’re also pseudonyms, ghosts, and playbacks, echoing from insubstantial handles drifting on the web. They lie and lurk and love online, channelling the morphemes of digital language and filtering the concerns of self, performance, digital identity, and complicity through the irreverence, non-rationality, and surprising beauty of Zen.
"Its poetics fanned by tutelary spirits, A Horse at the Window spans the burning issues of a world torn between the tangible and the digital. Okay, so it might set your head on fire. But that’s just as well." — S. D. Chrostowska, author of A Cage for Every Child
"A Horse at the Window is a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for our fractured, pixelated 21st century. With maximum velocity, existential wit, and dazzling imagery, Spencer Gordon spins a zoetrope of the Anthropocene that uncannily helps make sense of being alive today, yesterday, and tomorrow while claiming there is no point." — Zsuzsi Gartner, author of the Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted Better Living through Plastic Explosives
“A collection of super-funny, consistently enervating quasi-monologues that vehemently exists both in the right-now and in the eternal.” — Toronto Star
“To enter A Horse at the Window is to enter the world of dreams and visions, of funhouse mirrors and social-media terrors … Frequently profound, sometimes miraculous.” — Zoomer Magazine
“Genre-defying … Gordon effectively recognizes our overburdened condition and reproduces it with great accuracy.” — Literary Review of Canada
“A Horse at the Window is a pleasing work of ideas.” — The Miramichi Reader