"Mounted comprehensively re-historicizes the horse in the Americas. Across centuries and art forms, Kalli locates horses, but also their Black riders—from Jamaican dancehall and Beyoncé to Black diasporic spiritual practices and queer forms, to Boots Riley and Frederick Douglass—nothing is left out. I’m so happy to have a book so encyclopedic in its study of how horses power our Black, cultural mythos.”
Joy Priest, author of Horsepower
"In Mounted, Bitter Kalli tends and tills at the fence between liberation and harness. These essays gallop. They both dig deep into the ground we stand on while breaking open the space into which we might reach, and it is thrilling to follow this work.”
Johanna Hedva, author of How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom
"Bitter Kalli’s Mounted is a tour de force: an epic journey into the ancient heart of the human-equine relationship, these essays offer readers an exhilaratingly panoramic and achingly intimate exploration of our shared animal life—the long history of horse and human entanglement, a history both mundane and mythic, as much about exploitation as emancipation. The thrilling pleasure of this collection feels like riding wild and free in the company of a nimble friend: it gives the vivifying joy of being the rider and the horse, all at once.
Elaine Castillo, author of How To Read Now and Moderation