Stunt Heart - Paperback

by Mary Jo Thompson (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Mary Jo Thompson's work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry 2011 and Another and Another: An Anthology from the Grind Daily Writing Series. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals including, Field, Beloit Poetry Journal, RHINO, Indiana Review, Carolina Quarterly, Great River Review, Sows Ear Poetry Review, and Minnesota Monthly, among others. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Stunt Heart is the winner of the 2016 Backwaters Prize.