2021 Contest Winner
Ghost Heart
Mary Pinard
The formally and linguistically innovative poems in Ghost Heart engage science and cultural history to explore the complex nature of the vanishing American prairie. Weaving lyrical meditations on her life as a young widow with expansive evocation of the environment, Mary Pinard reveals intimate depths and magnitudes of loss – at once personal and ecological – while giving readers visions of how we might reinvent ourselves and restore the planet.
From Ghost Heart
Dear Prairie I’ve Been Meaning . . .
to . . . Ever since I can remember, you . . .
I still keep it, that old photo: me, my . . .,
brothers, father . . . All those years traveling
back through you, I . . . Looking out the car
window, I saw your . . ., vastness . . . I wanted
. . . you to know . . . even though I was
small, voiceless, . . . less . . . I now carry
your . . . gold, . . . grasses . . . a rhythm. I have
tried to . . . but only remnants, a fading I
know . . . A chance to repair . . . re-
pair . . . A needle’s eye, this . . . I am
learning to read . . . stay . . . awake. If
. . . get this . . . write . . .
Review
“With consummate artistry, Pinard stitches together facts and fabrics, memory and the present, mind, and heart. Asking readers to attend with their full selves, these poems offer in return a deep wisdom and an abiding beauty.”
Jennifer Barber
Author of The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made
About the Author
Mary Pinard
Mary Pinard teaches in the Arts & Humanities Division at Babson College in Wellesley, MA. Her first collection of poems, Portal, was published by Salmon Press in 2014. Her poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Iowa Review, Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Salamander, among others. She has also created poems in collaboration with Boston-area musicians, painters, and sculptors. She was born and raised in Seattle.
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