All One Horse

“It is impossible to stop our ears against the excruciating power of what Breytenbach has to say.”––Nadine Gordimer

“Obviously the greatest Afrikaner poet of this generation. . . . No one elevated the Boer language to such pure beauty and no one wielded it so devastatingly against the apartheid regime as its exiled poet Breyten Breytenbach.”–The New Yorker

All One Horse is a moving and haunting journey through Breyten Breytenbach’s kaleidoscopic imagination. His surreal and psychically charged paintings converse with his philosophical and lyrical prose pieces. The title is a nod to Chuang Tzu, and the writings are infused with glimmers of Eastern thought (as well as glimmers of the other worlds Breytenbach has inhabited).

An outspoken human rights activist, Breyten Breytenbach is a poet, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and painter (his paintings and drawings have been exhibited around the world). After years of exile in France, in 1975 he was apprehended during a clandestine trip to South Africa, accused of terrorism for his anti-apartheid activities, and spent seven years in prison. He received the Alan Paton Non-Fiction Award for Return to Paradise in 1994 and the Hertzog Prize for poetry in 1999 and 2007.

Bitesize (yet with plenty to digest) lyrical, philosophical, provocative prose pieces with Breytenbach's original paintings.

Publishers Weekly

South African poet Breytenbach (True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist) offers a dreamy take on the artistic impulse in these 27 short prose fictions. Many are slyly couched as fables; each has a facing page watercolor in Breytenbach's own hand. The poet's role-as the book's consistent speaker notes in "This Unmemorable Memory Exists!"-is like that of a tree: to create a space, to consecrate absence, to be "a place where oblivion could be predicated and practiced endlessly." In "Between the Legs," the narrator finds "God is Word or Flesh or some such"; repeatedly uses the Holocaust codeword Sonderbehandlüng(it's not translated, but it means "special handling"); and ends by noting "God 'is a Brazilian'." Near book's end, in "Bathed in Tears," the speaker confronts an imposter brother-who may be a symbol of artistic fraudulence-with a knife and tries to skin his hands. Surreal and opaque, Breytenbach's self-described "minor" squibs on where art comes from (written in the mid-1980s and seeing their first U.S. publication) are equal parts violence and whimsy. (Sept.)

Outspoken human rights activist Breyten Breytenbach is a poet, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and painter. After years of exile in France, in 1975 he was apprehended during a clandestine trip to South Africa, convicted for terrorism for his anti-apartheid activities, and imprisoned for seven years. He received the Alan Paton Prize in 1994 the Herzog Prize for poetry in 1999.