Hearts

Precise and compassionate, Joanne Corey weaves a tale of her mother's dying. The poem "Lemon Pizzelles" chilled me with "It depends how fast you pray" after sections of the Ave Maria. She inhabits this space in the best possible way, "never severed," a book hard to put down.

-Kyle Laws, author of The Sea Is Woman, Uncorseted, Ride the Pink Horse, and Wildwood

I love the way the poems in this little book work together, as naturally as blooms emerging, sunning, and fading in the same garden box. They work quickly, these poems, like love or roses or both, and you will realize as you read that so much of their labor takes place in the quiet, in the darkness of losing a mother or the peace of eating food prepared with care. A reader cannot help being transported to her own experiences with loss and birth. The speaker brings us closer to understanding how families create and lose hearts by drawing us into her family when a granddaughter is born and a grandmother declines, bringing out the intense, instinctual ways they have nursed one another through life transitions. Each poem is at once unassuming and precise. At the last page, I just sat at my desk, holding the book like the bouquet it is, more ready to re-enter reality with compassion because I was carrying a new tenderness into it.

-Abby E. Murray, author of Hail and Farewell

Joanne Corey's Hearts celebrates and grieves for spoonfuls of memories found within the loving and caring for aging parents. Here, there are smiles and the bittersweet found in pizzelles, pill cases, a newborn grandchild, and expiration dates. These short poems belie delicate moments that gradually dissipate, even as they linger like a flickering lifetime.

-Tara Betts, author of Refuse to Disappear