Bonnie Burke

JEANETTE HORN

Poetic License

Play, With Knives, the debut novel of Jeanette Horn, was published in March 2025. However, its origins reach further back.

“Around twenty years ago, I began writing a book of poetry that I wanted to be all-encompassing, mixing items from every era and culture: trebuchets with Victorian lace, cuneiform with helicopters,” Horn says.

“To enable this, a time-traveling magus would guide readers through the book.”

HORN NEVER completed the book. Ten years later, she began writing Play, With Knives.

“I was still attached to the same concept, but I didn’t want to write a fantasy novel about a wand-waving magician,” she explains.

“Considering other ways I could include things from any place or period, it hit me: actors. They can become anyone and go anywhere, even throughout time.”

PLAY, WITH KNIVES follows a struggling theater troupe touring the Midwest by train.

A talented painter, Edgar Cosentino, is hired as the set designer. He finds happiness in his budding relationship with actress Ava Vale, but she harbors a secret: She is married, technically.

Playwright Fallon Finn-Dorset watches this drama unfold and incorporates it into her plays. But strange things happen on the train. Lies blur with truth, and scenes from Fallon’s writing magically come to life.

“Funnily enough, the magic I had decided against early on ended up creeping back into the manuscript, albeit in a dreamlike, surreal way,” says Horn. “I decided to lean in.”

A GRADUATE of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Horn is grounded in poetry. 

She spent much of her childhood reading and making books. At eleven, she decided to become a writer, and she devoted herself to poetry several years later, when a William Carlos Williams documentary revealed to her that poetry doesn’t have to rhyme.

This background is reflected in her prose. Beautifully and masterfully surreal, Play, With Knives is lauded for its “pulsing vitality” and “exquisite prose”: precise, lyrical, refined.

HORN LIVES in Austin, Texas, with her husband and dogs. Her father emigrated from Helsinki at age twenty-five to pursue a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago.

“My grandparents sent me and my brothers many Finnish children’s books when we were growing up, so my first discovery of Finnish literature was most likely through books like the Moomin series,” says Horn.

“I was an avid reader as a girl, and those stories were incredibly fun and imaginative—I’d never come across anything else quite like them.”

IN COLLEGE Horn discovered the Kalevala, Finland’s national epic, through a beautiful vintage English copy her grandparents had found.

“As a young poet in graduate school, I became very eager to read Eino Leino’s work, though it was hard to find much of it in translation. My grandmother claimed that we’re related.”