My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses by Rachel Burns is a raw, propulsive book of poems and lyric prose that moves through teenage motherhood, addiction, poverty, care work, violence, and the long afterlife of classed shame with furious clarity and bruised humour. Across six sections, Burns writes from buses, pubs, kitchens, prisons, foodbanks, council estates, and the uneasy calm of nature reserves, allowing memory to return in flashcuts, refrains, and narrative riffs that feel as immediate as speech.
 
The collection's emotional range is wide, from the bleak comedy of survival and the tenderness of parenthood to the stark ache of friendship, loss, and what gets left behind, while recurring motifs of horses, film, music, and woodland destruction thread private life into a wider social landscape. It is a book that refuses respectability and refuses silence, insisting on testimony without polishing the edges.
 
PRAISE for My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses:
Rachel Burns’s breathtaking new collection offers us a world: boys drinking snakebite outside the slaughterhouse, a bride who carries a wedding cake onto the number 21 bus. The poet has complete mastery of a pacy, direct, innovative, colloquial language, which allows these poems to draw blood. Few collections of poetry have lived so much or seen so much; few writers have the ability to forge a language so vivid and brilliant that we can be right there and live it too. Like the tent down by the river which one poem gives us, ‘so moth-eaten and black with mould//you can poke your finger through the canvas/and leave holes for the stars,’ these completely essential poems give us a life, with all of its grit, and all its tremendous beauty. Read them!
   — Jonathan Edwards
 
In My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses, Rachel Burns draws us into these bright burning portals that puncture through life and time, holding out to us an old hurt, a flush of shame, or the awkward, vulnerable pulp of love. A painter in phrases, Burns’ poems are immersive and richly contiguous; she locates the texture or weight or weightlessness of being young, then older, of feeling changed but unchanged, and always to an appropriate soundtrack.
   — Jack Underwood
 
Rachel Burns’ new collection ‘leaves holes for stars,’ so you, too can believe that ‘one day [your] horse will come in.’  These poems stitch together the fabric of a very relatable world, one of pop culture, of family ties and of heartbreak. Burns’ wit, form, allusions, and wordplay create poems for everyone, for all of us, but maybe most importantly for women, for only a woman can really see ‘all the moving parts’ of the life we experience in poems, and in a single day. 
   — Leah Umansky
 
ABOUT Rachel Burns:
Rachel Burns lives in County Durham. She was awarded a DYCP Arts Council Grant in 2023. She won the Classical Association Poetry Prize in 2026. She was placed second in The Julian Lennon Prize for Poetry 2021 and second in the Disabled Poets Prize 2024. Her poetry has been widely anthologised, including COAL Smith/Doorstop and North Country, Saraband. Rachel has facilitated poetry workshops for The Ginkgo Prize, Tees Women Poets, The Writing School and Creative Future. Her pamphlet, A Girl in a Blue Dress, is published by Vane Women Press.