Description: Winner of the 2016 Backwaters Prize, Henri Cole, judge. 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; these poems are direct, personal, and disarmingly emotive.
Brief description: 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 many 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 2016 Backwaters Prize.
Review Quotes: "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
-- (12/18/2019 12:00:00 AM)