Elizabeth Went West

The poems in Elizabeth Went West speak in voices revolving around the lives of women. The title selection is an imagined correspondence among three women: Elizabeth Russell, an 18th-century diarist, who owned a great deal of land in what is now Toronto, the 19th-century Canadian writer Susanna Moodie, and an unnamed present-day poet. The other women in Horner's poetry allude to points all over the world but their view is firmly rooted in the prairies and Canadian city life. The speakers in her poems touch upon important, universal human issues like sex, marriage, and parenthood.