Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Stunt Heart

Stunt Heart

Thompson, Mary Jo

Paperback

Series: Backwaters Prize in Poetry

Death & DyingGeneral Poetry

Publisher Price: $16.00

ISBN10: 1935218468
ISBN13: 9781935218463
Publisher: Backwaters Press
Published: Aug 20 2017
Pages: 90
Weight: 0.32
Height: 0.22 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In Stunt Heart, Mary Jo Thompson's debut collection, a female gaze locates the ironies inside the subjects of marriage and death, loneliness and love, speaking and silence. The title plays on both sick hearts and circus tricks, and appropriately, these poems are direct, personal, and disarmingly emotive. Look at the end of the first poem, Says Penelope, where the speaker suddenly veers to Newsflash: I sleep- / walk. These stark moments of admission are used to perfection in the centerpiece sonnet series, Thirteen Months, the collection's highlight. Distilled emotion over the illness and death of an estranged husband ranges in tone from the dark humor that compares the marriage to a used car to the elegiac imagery of protecting the family garden from frost. The shock of seeing the deceased in his casket looking like a cross between Clark Gable and Dracula seasons the collection, recurring in ruminations on the various ways a body is prepared at death and the story of a mother who dies while sneezing.

Although no one brings back the dead by writing poetry, in Stunt Heart, Thompson revisits them with credible humor and tough dispatches from bedrooms, graveyards, and hospital hallways. Thompson's Stunt Heart jukes, dodges, and prays while muscling through all manners of demise and in the process reveals how one can turn grief into speech, art into grieving.

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