My mind is threadbare
on your subject, Lesbia, ruined

by our ignoble encounters,
the power of your devotion.

I can't wish you a good day,

though you are good,
and if you were not so,
I'd still want you.

In Goodbye Horses, Nathaniel G. Moore reanimates the lion's share of Catullus' surviving poems in an absorbing homage to the beloved romantic, his world, the friends he loved, his style (elegy, anaphora, hyperbaton), the myths he riffed on (Attis, Laodamia and Protesilaus), the writers he admired (Sappho, Cicero) and the family he left behind.

Once described as a "Toronto small press fixture" by Flare Magazine, Nathaniel G. Moore is the author of seven books, including Savage, winner of the 2014 ReLit Award for Best Novel. His work has appeared in Canadian Literature, The Globe and Mail, PRISM international, The National Post, This Magazine, Taddle Creek, The Georgia Straight and Broken Pencil. A lifelong Torontonian, he currently lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick with his wife Amber McMillan, the poet and poetry editor (Nightwood Editions, PRISM international, Douglas & McIntyre), and daughter. He works as a publicist for Nightwood Editions, Douglas & McIntyre and Harbour Publishing and moonlights as a freelance journalist.

Nathaniel G. Moore's profile page

"Goodbye Horses is dexterous and wild as a mustang--drop what you're doing and enter its mad gallop."
- Cornelia Hoogland

"'Piss and affection,' eh? Yessum, that's love-vulgar, low-down, Latinate, highfalutin. In these epigrams, these epiphanies of language and/or lingo, Nathaniel G. Moore goes to town with the Romans, dives into bed with the Romans, gets dirty with the Romans, serenading harlots and calling hell down on rascals, with the temperament of Catullus, Ovid, and Virgil, and he doesn't give a damn for classical niceties. Goodbye Horses is a helluva dredging of the Latin canon. Hear the scalding cold of a sweet bitch's words confront a sissy jerk's eloquence that's only educated hissing. Herein is Poetry: no unwilling song, no wimpish whistling, but oodles of blues, edifying, defying Cassandras with wandering limbs and thundering tongues, or, rather, deifying em.... And spitting at those test-rat imperialists, those Romeos with unwholesome genitals...."
- George Elliott Clarke