A Nightmare on Horseback

Robert Cooperman has been writing about the poetry-spouting, murderous anti-hero John Sprockett for three decades now, starting with The Badman and the Lady. In A Nightmare on Horseback, we learn about the disfiguring scar resulting from an encounter with a grizzly bear that has always been Sprockett's horrifying mark. He joins the Confederate guerrilla leader William Quantrill and his Raiders in their infamous 1863 massacre in Lawrence, Kansas. Yet also, as in The Badman and the Lady and The Widow's Burden, Sprockett reveals his tender side with regard to the fairer sex. This is an exciting, if sometimes horrifying, sequence of poems that tells its tale in vivid verse.

-Charles Rammelkamp, author of The Field of Happiness

Robert Cooperman's A Nightmare on Horseback continues the extensive back story of John Sprockett, a man who would not be out of place in the myth busting novel of the old west,
Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy. Sprockett is the bear-mauled one, the titular nightmare on horseback, but a deeply conflicted one. On one hand he is a romantic defender of women's virtue and a quoter of poetry and on the other a ruthless killer. While Cooperman's tale is firmly rooted in the Civil War years, the themes are as timeless as the Trojan Wars and as contemporary as 1/6.

-Alan Catlin poet and editor Misfit Magazine

Robert Cooperman's new collection of poems, A Nightmare on Horseback, reads like a tall tale of the American West told in multiple voices, a narrative play in verse. It's a rousing story, but it is adapted from history: the burning of the Free-State town of Lawrence, Kansas, by Quantrill's Raiders during the Civil War. The main character is one of those raiders, John Sprockett, a man gone bad but who loved his doomed Sarah and who believes in Jesus, a murderer who quotes Shakespeare, a Southern sympathizer who teams up with a run-away slave. The story is told in a sequence of dramatic monologues with over a dozen speaking characters, including Confederates who justify slavery with the Bible, farming families caught between the two sides, a former slave headed to the Colorado Territory to start her own restaurant, two 10-year-old girls, and a Pawnee outcast who at times serves as the Greek chorus in an epic about White men stupidly slaughtering each other. While the poems enlist some familiar conventions about the "Wild West," the verse flows confidently, the characters take on depth and complexity, and the story pulls us in. Cooperman is too good of a storyteller to end the tale with redemption, but by the time Sprockett reaches the Rockies, we may even wish him well. This is a good book to read aloud around a campfire.

-Jeff Franklin, author of Where We Lay Down