Rachel Burns, "My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses"

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. My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses is published by Broken Sleep Books.

About My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses, by Rachel Burns
My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses 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.

You can read more about My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read two poems from the collection. 

From My Last Address, Horses, Horses, Horses

Love in the 80s

Rubik’s Cubes
& Fred Perry white polo shirts

The roller-disco Life – La-La-La-La
I’d watch you from my bedroom window

Doing bunny hops on your BMX 
Counting 1,2,3 like Hopscotch 

Wheeling my shopper bike
Through the metal gate

Riding around the green
In the hope you’d notice 

I’d graffiti my school book
I love Joe

Heart & cupid arrows
Dreamily dissecting a frog

You were sent to Ireland 
To fight in The Troubles

The mines & steelworks all gone
It was the army or the Monger’s Yard

You came back hyem
Not quite the same

I still think of you
As that boy 

Who changed
The colour of your hair

More times than I’d had hot dinners

School Bus Anthem 

I sit at the back with Shelley and Titch,
sharing a long cigarette, smoking it down to the fag end. 
Bernadette goes from seat to seat, can yer sponsor us 50p, pet?     
We all know the money isn’t for the starving babbies in Africa.

The big lads on the bus, bounce first years up and down, 
up and down, on their knees. This is the way the donkey’s ride,
the donkey’s ride, the donkey’s ride.

The old double-decker crawls up the bank, wheezing like a knackered miner.
We pile to one side, just as it hits the hairpin bend, knowing the driver, 
won’t make the gear change in time. 

The engine smokes, splutters and coughs, wheels spin backwards. 
Time rewinds. The bus grinds to a stop. We pile out the exit, 
a herd of untamed ants. The driver shakes a fist.
Ger off yer little bastards! Ger off!