In Stunt Heart, Mary Jo Thompson's debut collection, a female
gaze locates the ironies inside the subjects of marriage and death,
loneliness and love, speaking and silence. The title plays on both
sick hearts and circus tricks, and appropriately, these poems are
direct, personal, and disarmingly emotive. Look at the end of the
first poem, "Says Penelope," where the speaker suddenly veers to
"Newsflash: I sleep- / walk." These stark moments of admission are
used to perfection in the centerpiece sonnet series, "Thirteen
Months," the collection's highlight. Distilled emotion over the
illness and death of an estranged husband ranges in tone from the
dark humor that compares the marriage to a used car to the elegiac
imagery of protecting the family garden from frost. The shock of
seeing the deceased in his casket looking like a cross between
Clark Gable and Dracula seasons the collection, recurring in
ruminations on the various ways a body is prepared at death and the
story of a mother who dies while sneezing. Although no one brings
back the dead by writing poetry, in Stunt Heart, Thompson
revisits them with credible humor and tough dispatches from
bedrooms, graveyards, and hospital hallways. Thompson's Stunt
Heart jukes, dodges, and prays while muscling through all
manners of demise and in the process reveals how one can turn grief
into speech, art into grieving.