The Horse Fair

In The Horse Fair, Robin Becker investigates how people marginalized because of gender, religion, and sexual preference negotiate public and private spheres while inventing sustainable communities. Beginning with the great nineteenth-century French painter Rosa Bonheur, Becker has produced a number of multi-voiced, synthetic portraits. She speaks from the persona of Charlotte Salomon, who was the child of assimilated German-Jewish parents and was killed by the Nazis at the age of twenty-six; she appropriates passages from the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services and juxtaposes them against stanzas that mourn her sister's death and those that celebrate non-traditional families. Organized around the long meditations, other poems show Becker's dexterity with formal verse. The Horse Fair takes its name from Bonheur's monumental painting and serves as the vehicle through which Becker explores anti-Semitism, cross-dressing, and Bonheur's lifelong relationships with women.