BooksByBlackAuthors.png As Black History Month officially comes to a close, there’s a mixture of feelings clinging to the air. For...
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.”
ISBN:
9781571314154 Publish Date:
02/10/2003
Pages:
86
Size:
6 × 9 × 0.25 in
Weight:
5.3 oz
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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.”
Charles Baxter
“Sometimes autobiographical, always intimate . . . Deborah Keenan’s very best poems are beautiful, often surreal, with sharp images derived from workaday life, nature and dreams.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
“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.”
Philadelphia Inquirer
“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.”
Judith Guest
author of Ordinary People
“Deborah Keenan breathes bold life back into the lyric in these brave and reverberant poems.”
Carol Muske-Dukes
“These poems think and feel simultaneously, and fiercely. Simply put, this book is brave and beautiful.”
Elizabeth Alexander
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