Mock Heart

New & Selected Poems

By: Jill Bialosky

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

"The antidote we all need . . . [her] poetry evokes despair, survival—and most important, hope." —Katie Couric

Beginning with 1997's The End of Desire, readers met a young poet vibrating with the mysteries of sisterhood and attuned to premonitions of loss, examining the reckless hearts around her and considering her own. This work of documenting her wishes, hopes, and doubts, has continued through four more books, including The Players, with its fetching examination of a mother in the world of teenage boys and baseball, and the recent Asylum, a lyric meditation on both personal and historical challenges rooted in the lived landscape. In this powerful gathering of her work thus far, Bialosky begins with a cache of searing new poems, and proceeds backward in time through the books, allowing us to live in the now, to look back at the woman she was through the one she became.

A poet of quiet daring, one who delves into the spaces where desire blooms—but also questions the why of it, when nothing lasts, when suffering is often the consequence—Bialosky is never content to rest on the laurels of the beauty she finds around her. Her double-edged understanding is her super power, and allows her reader, across this five-volume selection, to experience everything from her sister's suicide to her son's maturing into manhood in a space of intimate wonder, where sorrow and loss as well as joy feed the earned wisdom that finished poems will bestow.

This unforgettable volume celebrates a woman's ongoing survival and the vital act of shaping words on the page that make it possible.