A HORSE WITH A NAME by Justin Clifford Rhody

Pub date: October 5, 2026. ISBN 9798991148962. 88 pages. 5" x 8". Cover is printed on a C&P Pilot Press. Book is perfect bound.

A Horse With A Name is a compendium of aspirations composed entirely of thoroughbred horse names gleaned by Justin Clifford Rhody from discarded racing programs at Oakland’s now-defunct Golden Gate Fields. This expanded edition of the work—featuring the author's photographs from the track alongside the original text—forms a record of the myths, values, and aesthetics of an America where every finish line is another beginning and every long shot has its day. 

Starship Verdict. Verisimilitude. The Custodian. Divorced from context and processed through a cut-up consciousness, these names race beyond their referents into a study of how language and meaning behave when given free rein.

Justin Clifford Rhody’s book is an artful registry of poetry, advertising, and aspiration. Composed out of discarded programs from races at Golden Gate Fields, Rhody displays the West through what it bets on, like a subversive Eadweard Muybridge some 140 years later. By arranging over a thousand horse names, such as “Fear the Cowboy” and “Cost of Freedom,” Rhody plays not only with semantics, but sociology. A Horse With A Name helps us to slow down and observe a culture that so frequently gallops past us at full speed. —Laura Paul 

The starting line of Justin Rhody’s A Horse With A Name is infinity’s threshold of  forever’s endless runs-for-the-roses, winning hearts placed on sleeves showing and telling per sprung haunches rounding learning curves’ sung hunches, straightaway’s time crunches. 

Just as Eco “likes lists because he doesn’t want to die,” Rhody, jockey and/as bookmaker, spurs a thousand horses toward name-dropping the ordered disorder of a free-falling dead heat, giddyaps Eco’s giddiness, refloats Homer’s ship inventory as a boatload of pounding hooves and champed bits, a catalog of steeds and mares, a vertiginous, drop-down stampede of neck and neck long shots, one damn horse after another. 

Racing form as eternity’s roll call, timelessness’s track record, randomness ordering pole positioning as randomness, reined in some, becomes the order of the day, each horse winning by a nose, by a nose, by a nose. —John Crouse

“There were plants and birds and rocks and…things.” Ethanol. A woman with pants. More Champagne. Don’t hook my halo, my happy face, testosterone, scattered dreams. Mongolian chrome. Addiction ends here, factory of faith invading humor. Hug a tree, false positive. You never learn. New nature. I will if you will. Scat Daddy’s breeze touching rainbows could be for real, put it back. Unbridled daddy. Purely boy. Chutney. Time to get even. Mist opportunity. Don’t worry. Don’t you want me? Excellent idea. The air was full of sound. That was America, bobo. Try a lemon drop. Why not be perfect? —Ryan Skrabalak

How do we name the things we must surmount? Or, more difficult, how do we coin sobriquet for what we’ve sent to conquer the land? What follows is a sport of language, one that has entertained conquistador, gambler, poet and common man since 4500 BC. Artist and poet Justin Clifford Rhody continues his aesthetic investigation of the American West with this installment of found-language, compiled from the littered racing programs collected during the artist’s time spent amidst the bright, dusty bleachers of California’s extant race horse tracks. 

Both plaintive and humorous, A Horse With A Name is more than just procession; it is an archive of language that is pinned down both historically and geographically. It tilts us towards the edge of our seats, curiously indexing the neuroses, desires, and even political yearnings of a certain west coast populous. Questions are raised: Why all of the name calling? What are the stakes? At once epic and odd, Scattered Dreams, American Progress, Roman Guitar—these are our champions. 

With sun-drenched wrists, we send them off. —Rebecca Ramirez