“Do we want love / each and every day of our lives?” Jan Conn asks in a poem called “Michoacán.” “You bet your ass,” she answers. The poems of Botero’s Beautiful Horses are charged with otherness, bright with the exhilaration and danger of transformation. Many are descriptions of surrealist canvases, astonishingly kinetic narratives composed by looking hard at unusual pictures, the artists’ writings and their circumstances – and letting them speak for themselves. The book becomes a journey away from the familiar into other cultures, especially Latin American. Poem after poem gathers a sense of inner as well as outward journey away from a “perilous childhood” into a wide world rich and strange with a recurrent underworld motif of darkness, blackness. But what a black! Rich and various, life as if viewed in the “obsidian mirrors the Aztecs fashioned from the dark.

Peony Vertigo is Jan Conn's tenth book of poetry. Her poetry has received a CBC Literary Prize, the inaugural P.K. Page Founder's Award, and in 2016 was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a member of the collaborative writing group Yoko's Dogs whose publications include, most recently, Caution Tape (Collusion Press, 2021). She works full-time as a Research Scientist and Professor at the New York State Department of Health in Albany, NY and State University of New York at Albany on the vector biology and evolution of Latin American mosquito vectors. She is also a visual artist. She lives in rural western Massachusetts.

Jan Conn's profile page

Jan Conn is a Dali with a scalpel of words, with colourwheels for eyes. To read her is to feel alive, sometimes flayed, but always securely held in a dream overwhelmingly rich with exotic flora and fauna. She is conducting an operation of intelligence and observation, a taxonomy of the senses cooked over flames of Art and wholly embracing the cultures of the Americas.

Marilyn Bowering

Botero’s Beautiful Horses is the latest in Jan Conn’s unique body of poetic writing that blends science, history, image, and dream into what she calls the “[s]trange embrace” of the surreal, the concrete, the visual, and the intellectual.

Canadian Literature