“In these courageous, searching poems, Mary Pinard explores what she calls an “echo-system”–or, perhaps, several such systems, woven together. Leaning into grief and loss—personal, the grief of a widow, and planetary, the lament for the endangered prairie biome—she writes of “perspective and its loss, // inevitable erasures.” Formally expansive (including concentrated elegies, sprawling Georgics, sonnets, tritinas, a form of truncated sestina, and haiku), these poems piece together “remnants” in new vitalities.  

–Elizabeth Dodd
editor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance and Democracy
and author of Horizon’s Lens

“My heart might be a prairie,” Mary Pinard writes, “…made / to stand despite the unbroken // wind, vanishings, / loneliness.”  Prairies and loneliness are the warp and weft of GhostHeart, plainspoken poems of uncommon inventiveness and beauty . . . . 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