Stunt Heart

“I admire the hard precision of these sad and humorous poems whose central concern is the confusion of death with marital love. For me, this theme culminates in the powerful sonnet sequence ‘Thirteen Months’ (published in The Best American Poetry). Here, form imitates feeling as Mary Jo Thompson’s sonnets expand and contract like a stunt heart beating. I also admire the patient work of language throughout this collection—language that is always striving toward truth and the controlled magic of poem-making.”—Henri Cole
 

“When the heat of the passionate tongue encounters, by winter’s laws, the frozen surface of life’s betrayals, a ‘smarting / mouth,’ bleeding, freed, cooled by snow—speaks with a colder, finer precision. This is Thompson’s own metaphor for the self that survives by speech—hers with eloquent mockery, rueful playfulness, candor, sheer nerve, words that ‘make / that long run / down black keys. . .’ such a lively cascade of tempered sound, the heaviness of truth lightened by mastery of style.”—Eleanor Wilner
 

“Maybe what we conceive of as the heart is really the attentiveness we bring to our own lives. In poems that are as intense in their candor as in their craft, Mary Jo Thompson’s attention is fearless, vulnerable, and gorgeous. Stunt Heart surveys the heart’s desires and its failings and finds a world where the past is ‘helixed inside us’ and ‘crows are loud, incessant.’ Here there is no escaping grief, but there’s no escaping joy, either. Unabashed even in the face of pain, Thompson keeps reminding us of the heart’s, and poetry’s great stunt: ‘We will talk to the end / in that way love // has taught us.”—Rick Barot