Mock Heart

“’Woman must write her self,’ the French critic Hélène Cixous argued. Bialosky has accomplished this for three decades while appearing to embrace Celan’s wisdom in claiming language as an act of survival. It is a survival of the heart, mock or authentic, in poetry.”—Carol Muske-Dukes, The New York Times Book Review


“This is a treasury of frank, beautiful, smart, rueful, and generous poems charting a life in lyrics meditative, scalding, phosphorescent, and sustaining. . . . [Bialosky’s] poems, with their lush, moody palette of feelings, thoughts, and memories, thrum with narrative energy.” —Donna Seaman, Booklist

“[A] generous compendium. . . . Surveying a life shaped by love, motherhood, mortality, art, and the natural world, Bialosky’s poems find quiet revelation in ordinary moments without giving way to sentimentality. . . . Throughout, Bialosky favors lucid, unadorned language, allowing image and rhythm to carry emotional force. . . . Poetry fans should seek out this comprehensive overview of a distinguished career.” —Publishers Weekly

“To read Jill Bialosky’s Mock Heart: New & Selected Poems is to explore the lyric opulence of a life lived at the nexus of beauty and its blood sister, loss. Beginning with the most recent poems, sharp-edged, elegantly crafted, and wise, we transcend retrospectively toward the earliest work, plumbing the origin story via ‘time’s strange, mysterious alienation’—seasonal time, erotic time, interiority’s whirling facets, beauty, impromptu and fleeting, and grief-without-end. On those nights in which I doubt poetry’s efficacy, I will turn to this collection to arrive again at the last poem’s final line— ‘I was afraid’—and to feel in alliance with that austere vulnerability. Mock Heart leads us all the way to the very real heart of a palpable human being.” —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry

“Mock Heart, Jill Bialosky’s superb new volume, holds both exquisite new and brilliantly selected earlier poems, offering readers the formal equipoise we love in Bishop and Strand, as well as her deep, elegiac tenderness, which touches and informs all her poetry. Whether engaging the complexities of motherhood, the transports of desire or the resistance of experience to the making of art, these thirty years of Jill Bialosky’s poetic works stand as a testament to our faith—and the poet’s—in the act of poetry as the most compelling mirror of our reckless yet faithful human hearts.” —David St. John, author of Prayer for My Daughter

”Jill Bialosky’s brilliant poems celebrate things of this world with an intense clarity that links them to the mind that bears griefs along with joys. Her vision is of the world’s beauties and cruelties existing side by side, earthly wonders along with far-reaching violence, madness, and injustice. It’s the beauties that remain, as in the lyrical sonnets at the start of the book. Bialosky ranges in her accurate observations of daily life, though her deepest concern is the human heart. I reach for this book in these troubled times.” —Grace Schulman, author of Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems

“‘All of us, humans, plants, birds, deer, are made of matter,’ Jill Bialosky writes in a glorious new poem, a tribute to Lucretius, ‘The Nature of Things.’ Bialosky has for decades taken the measure of lived life in all its phases, creating some of the greatest contemporary poems about being a child, a lover, a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister. Her voice is wry, curious, tender, and then suddenly expansive; her intellect is rigorous, a little skeptical; she writes like a dream both in and out of forms. Bialosky’s new poems give evidence of a poet at the very top of her powers.” —Dan Chiasson, author of The Math Campers