The Smoke of Horses

A poem from the new collection, "Attraction," was published in an October 2016 issue of The New Yorker. Rafferty's poems have appeared widely in such places as The New Yorker, O, Oprah Magazine, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Quarterly West, Massachusetts Review, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily.This collection is new and fascinating territory for Rafferty-unlike any of his previous books-as he once had an aversion to prose poetry. According to Rafferty, "I used to think of prose poems as mules-sterile hybrids. Now, I see the prose poem as a euglena-that cutthroat survivor with a foot in two kingdoms. These are prose poems. They're the result of my own misgivings about what a line can and should do-and how easily I've failed."Since he was a teenager, Rafferty has drawn significant influence from the poet Arthur Rimbaud. His work is similar to that of Charles Simic, Mark Strand, Christopher Kennedy, and Russell Edson.Rafferty is a different kind of poet, who balances multiple jobs, a family, and his craft by writing on lunch breaks or in the "quiet time between the kids falling asleep and the wine taking its toll." Even with this routine, he is a well-respected and widely-published poet.