June 9 | 2023
reading from Ghost Heart
Gather at 7 pm
Reading at 7:30 pm
Book signing to follow
Country | Citizens by Philip Heying in the gallery
Light hors d’oeuvres. Libations by donation.
You are welcome to bring a picnic.
Round tables in the Ruin, first come, first, serve.
Bring a lawn chair, just in case, and pick your spot around the rim.
Free Will Offering
Reservations appreciated. Reserve here
My heart might be a prairie…
– Mary Pinard
The evening begins at 7pm with light hors d’oeuvres, a bar by donation, and conversation in the lovely setting of the Ruin at Volland. Round tables and chairs in the floor of the Ruin will provide comfortable seating, first come, first serve. Or Bring a lawn chair and choose your spot around the rim. The poet will read at 7:30, followed by questions, answers, and more conversation. “Ghost Heart” will be available for purchase and signing as the day fades to sunset, then twilight, and a million stars.
Join us for a memorable and extraordinary evening!
Free will offering at the event. Reservations greatly appreciated.
MARY PINARD teaches literature and poetry courses in the Arts & Humanities Division at Babson College in Wellesley, MA. Her poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals, and she has published critical essays on poets, including Lorine Niedecker and Alice Oswald. She has also created poems in collaboration with Boston-area musicians, painters, and sculptors. Portal, her first collection of poems, was published by Salmon Press (2014), and her second book, Ghost Heart, won the 2021 Ex Ophidia Press Poetry Book Contest and was published by the press in Fall 2022.
Many of the poems for Ghost Heart, which takes as its primary subject the nature of the prairie and The Flint Hills, were written during time she spent in residency at Volland. Born and raised in Seattle, she has lived in the Boston area for over 25 years.
Books will be available for purchase and signing following the reading
“The formally and linguistically innovative poems in GHOST HEART engage science and cultural history to explore the complex nature of the vanishing American prairie. Weaving lyrical meditations on her life as a young widow with expansive evocations of the environment, Mary Pinard reveals intimate depths and magnitudes of loss —at once personal and ecological— while giving readers a vision of how we might reinvent ourselves and restore the planet.” – description
“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. With consummate artistry, Pinard stitches together facts and fabrics, memory and the present, mind and heart. Asking readers to attend with their full selves, these poems offer in return a deep wisdom and an abiding beauty.” —Jennifer Barber, author of The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made
“‘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 GHOST HEART, plainspoken poems of uncommon inventiveness and beauty. A widow searches for solace in her husband’s native prairielands. She studies their remnants, their histories, damage and losses, a cowbird eggshell, the rim of Flint Hills. She mends and remakes her husband’s effects. 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
“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
