Danica, a 20-year-old from Ottawa, Ontario and current student at the University of Toronto, submitted haikus about horses to her school’s literary journal. Not haikus about horses’ majestic beauty or the transcendant experience of riding one—haikus about how much horses suck. And her work is going to be published.
The University College at U of T’s official literary and visual arts journal, The UC Review, will publish Danica’s “Horses Are the Frat Boys of Farm Animals” in their winter edition.
Danica told BuzzFeed News she and horses don’t really get along all that well. “All my experiences with horses have been bad ones,” she said.
Danica decided to channel this hatred into poetry and ended up submitting her haikus to be published.
In addition to her poetry, Danica also submitted a series of photos of banana peels to the journal, which she called “Banana Peels of Toronto.” One of these photos has also been selected to run in the Winter edition of the journal.
Danica’s work was selected “after long consideration,” according to the email she received from the journal, and she “laughed for a good five minutes” when she got the news.
“My favourite part is the fact that they picked just one picture means they sat down and discussed which picture of a banana peel they liked best,” she wrote on her Tumblr.
The journal’s editor-in-chief, Albert Hoang, told BuzzFeed that the journal’s team found her horse haikus “hilarious” and “refreshing.”
“You don’t see people submitting humour very much, and these were refreshing and distinct from a lot of works we received,” Hoang said of the haikus. And of the banana peel photos, he said, “I don’t know if it was intended, but the composition and colours were also well done and it was a unanimous decision to feature it,” he added.
“I strongly support the idea of giving your own meaning or finding value in seemingly pointless things, so I’m really excited to be able to share that with so many people,” Danica told BuzzFeed. “One of the most important things to me is being able to make people laugh.”