Mock Heart

A career-spanning volume of the poet’s work charts the seasons of a woman’s life through desire and motherhood, grief and the consolations of poetry

“Reading Jill Bialosky’s poems feels like taking a slow and lone journey into the depth of the human heart, yet all the while being accompanied and guided by an intimate voice.” —Yiyun Li

Bialosky’s poems, “always intently alive with lyrical truths” (Yusef Komunyakaa), weave tragedy, language, and perception in poignant works of personal and public exploration. In Mock Heart, a powerful gathering of her work thus far, she opens with a cache of searing new poems and proceeds backward in time through selections from her five previous collections. We move from lyric sections of the acclaimed Asylum, a work that reveals personal and historical traumas and how we search for understanding in their wake, to the folly of The Players, about a son’s maturing into manhood in a space of intimate wonder, to Intruder, a haunting exploration of passion and its myths, to Subterranean, a book of maternal yearning, and finally we arrive back at her debut, The End of Desire, probing the mysteries of girlhood, premonitions of loss, and the temptations and challenges of becoming. 

A poet of quiet daring and lyric mastery, one who delves into the spaces where desire blooms, Bialosky is never content to rest on the laurels of the beauty she finds around her. Throughout her journey, sorrow and loss as well as joy feed the earned wisdom that finished poems will bestow.