Jill Bialosky with Marie Howe: Mock Heart

Two of America’s most distinguished poets — Jill Bialosky and Pulitzer Prize winner Marie Howe — join us for the launch of Bialosky’s new career-spanning collection Mock Heart: New and Selected Poems.

A celebrated poet, memoirist, novelist, and editor, Jill Bialosky has spent decades shaping the work of other writers while steadily building a profoundly compelling body of poetry. Mock Heart offers a remarkable retrospective of her achievement, opening with a powerful sequence of new poems before moving backward through selections from her five previous collections. Together, they chart the seasons of a woman’s life — from the mysteries of girlhood and the awakening of desire to motherhood, grief, historical reckoning, and the hard-won wisdom of time and age. Throughout, Bialosky’s poems, “always intently alive with lyrical truths” (Yusef Komunyakaa), reveal a poet of extraordinary emotional precision whose work continually seeks beauty without ever turning away from sorrow.

Lifelong champions of contemporary poetry, Bialosky and Howe come together to explore the making of a life in verse, the creative process, and the enduring power of language to illuminate love, loss, motherhood, memory, and desire. Hear Bialosky reflects on the evolution of her work, the intimate relationship between reading and writing, and what it means to devote a life to poetry — both as artist and editor.

Together, these two singular voices offer a rare opportunity to consider how poems are made, how they sustain us, and how they continue to shape the ways we understand ourselves and one another.

“Reading Jill Bialosky’s poems feels like taking a slow and lone journey into the depth of the human heart, yet all the while being accompanied and guided by an intimate voice.” — Yiyun Li