Emotional Support Horse - by Claudine Toutoungi (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Longlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize 2025
A London Review Bookshop Book of the Year 2024

Emotional Support Horse tracks the tragicomedy of grief, and out of low vision, bereavement and eco-stress blends poems of startling wit, verve and solace. A woman longs to transform into Nicola Walker in a cop car, or a Hungarian Vizsla, or just to find an equal footing with her doctor. Personal and planetary fractures blur in these vivid, dreamlike pages that will speak to anyone who has faced down confusion and rupture, when they strike. In part soulful, in part self-help, the poems veer between droll and despairing, their swings from high to low and back again reflecting a self adrift on a choppy sea. A self, however, not alone, but accompanied throughout by a host of other species. From earthworms to wolfhounds, flamingos to Konic ponies, the world of Emotional Support Horse flickers with light and life, charting sorrow's depths even as it stumbles upon joy.

About the Author

Claudine Toutoungi is a poet and playwright. She was born in Warwickshire, studied English and French at Trinity College, Oxford and has worked as an actor, a BBC radio drama producer, an English teacher, and a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow for Newnham and Selwyn Colleges in Cambridge. Carcanet published her debut poetry collection Smoothie in 2017. This was followed by Two Tongues (2020), which won the Ledbury Munthe Poetry Prize for Second Collections. She lives in Cambridge.