Horizon Note [Hardcover]

A son is born too early, as if coming up over the horizon before his own dawn. An elderly father lingers at life’s other horizon. In language dense and clear, playful and somber, and with a formal exactitude and emotional amplitude suggestive of her own musical training, Behn traverses these horizons “extracting,” like the horizon note that drones through traditional Indian music, “a red needle from the sky.”

A son is born too early, as if coming up over the horizon before his own dawn. An elderly father lingers at life’s other horizon. In language dense and clear, playful and somber, and with a formal exactitude and emotional amplitude suggestive of her own musical training, Behn traverses these horizons “extracting,” like the horizon note that drones through traditional Indian music, “a red needle from the sky.”

"Horizon Noteturns speech into music, even as it resists and questions the slippery, beloved, difficult stuff it's made of. Behn makes live, breathing art out of language’s terrible limitations, the paradoxical ways it both enables and betrays us."—Mark Doty, judge, 2001 Brittingham Prize in Poetry