Life on a small midwestern farm is the genesis of many of the poems in DEAD HORSES. Unsentimental and realistic, they celebrate an enduring involvement with horses (riding, breeding, foaling, and racing) and offer a tough-minded look at the vagaries of rural existence.

Winner of the 2013 FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize. David Pichaske writes in the Foreword to this collection: "Thirty-five years is a long time in anyone's career-long enough to see how things turned out. Long enough to allow us to draw some conclusions. Long enough to trace the arc of a career...." Joan Colby: Selected Poems represents a body of work "underwritten by an intelligence itself as fiery as it is sharp" (Philip Dacey), "both loud and haunting, both vivid and quiet as a falling stone" (Christina Zawadiwsky). Includes selections from Blue Woman Dancing in the Nerve (1979), Chagall Poems (1980), Dream Tree (1980), The Boundary Waters (1982), How the Sky Begins to Fall (1982), The Atrocity Book (1986), The Lonely Hearts Killers (1986), and Dead Horses (2012).