Good Heart
Written the year Deborah Keenan’s mother died and her first grandchild was born, these are poems that delve deeply into the ordinary passages and transformations of life, seeking out the possibility of a “Good Heart.”
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Praise and Prizes
“One of the central subjects of Good Heart is the wind—which in poetry is often the breath of inspiration; inspirations, the breath and daily breadth of it, governs these poems just as the contemplation of death does. The light and intensity of that contemplation—the light that death gives to our lives—interfuses Deborah Keenan’s beautiful poems and gives them their particular brilliance.”
“Sometimes autobiographical, always intimate . . . Deborah Keenan’s very best poems are beautiful, often surreal, with sharp images derived from workaday life, nature and dreams.”
“Deborah Keenan takes the logical to its often illogical but always just-right conclusion. . . . The words seem to brush past the mind, not meaning so much as making the electricity of meaning.”
“When I read Deborah Keenan’s poetry, I always think of jazz—the spaces she allows as essential as the notes she trikes. I think of Count Basie. I think of Fred Hersch, of themes circling back and around to gratify and to haunt.”
“Deborah Keenan breathes bold life back into the lyric in these brave and reverberant poems.”
“These poems think and feel simultaneously, and fiercely. Simply put, this book is brave and beautiful.”