“Pinard’s poems are shaped by grief, a wide variety of poetic forms, an affirming curiosity, and intellect. This shaping and containing and returning to the source of love and sorrow delicately—powerfully—enacts the human will to go on. These poems are more than a means of deliverance. They’re art.
— Kathleen Flenniken
author of Plume
“The poems in Ghost Heart probe history, science, and the poet’s loss in midlife of her beloved husband. Embedded in the word “remnant,” which makes its presence felt throughout the collection, is the idea of what remains—of the once-vast geographic and biological entity we call the prairie; of its first peoples, subjected to displacement and genocide; and of the poet’s life as she comes to terms with widowhood . . . .
—Jennifer Barber
author of The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made
What Will Happen
— from Ghost Heart
Deere, John
— from Ghost Heart
Biography
Mary Pinard is the author of two books of poetry, Portal (2014), and Ghost Heart (2022), which won the 2021 Ex Ophidia Press Prize for Poetry. Her play, Heart/Roots: Wabaunsee County, was published by Volland Press during the summer of 2022. Over the last 15 years, she has collaborated with several visual artists and musicians in the Boston area, where her poems have been variously incised in glass (“Fragment House,” Slocum River Reserve, Dartmouth, MA), shaped in wire (“Lineage,” Old Frog Pond Farm, Harvard, MA), adhered to an exhibit wall (“Breaking Prairie,” Hollister Gallery, Babson College), and set to music (“On the Wing: A Celebration of Birds in Words and Music,” performed at several New England venues).
She teaches literature and poetry courses in the Arts & Humanities Division at Babson College, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1990. She was born and raised in Seattle.
