Heart in a Jar

by Kathleen McGookey

“Every poem in this book is a like a heart in a jar. Kathleen’s superb eye and exacting craft rides on the power of images that throttle the reader off the page, yet one foot is so firmly rooted in the real world, we feel incredibly satisfied that we took a wild journey and came back home safely. These poems are a great ticket, existing as tremendous short scripts for the films she directs in our heads.” --Michael Delp, Lying in the River’s Dark Be Kathleen McGookey has published two full-length collections of poems and two chapbooks.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

Published April 4, 2017

Reviews

[Diane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maybe it was my mood but this was a dull, depressing read. I've liked some of her other work.

[Natalie Homer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fairytales with a modern twist, condensed into easily-digestible pill form—this is the aesthetic of Kathleen McGookey’s imaginative prose poems. The pacing is quick, and around each bend of the sentence, there awaits something surprising. In “The Day After a Girl Sprouted in a Flowerbed,” for example, readers are presented with the startling title that conjures Hans Christian Andersen’s Thumbelina—but then the first sentence of the poem is simple and plain: “Mother yanked her out.” This could apply to anything—a radish or a carrot or a common weed. As is often the case in McGookey’s poems, the extraordinary is treated as commonplace.

McGookey distinguishes herself by using the prose poem form so appropriately. In these poems, regular lineation wouldn't have been satisfactory. Another thing to admire is how these poems focus privately--often on a domestic scene, yet also reach much further than reality, engaging with magic and impossibilities.

[Thalia Andasol · Rating 4 out of 5]

fascinating little collection which focused on the transformation of the mundane into fairy tales, it provided a unique liveliness when it came to such death-centric poems, maybe being haunted is really a comfort, like a warm cup of tea before bed

[Derek Emerson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a world in which Death is part of the equation, children disappear or appear in unique ways, and animals move into doll houses. In Kathleen McGookey’s “Heart In A Jar,” her latest collection of prose poems, it is not a fantasy world, but a way of looking at our own experience in new ways. McGookey excels, both in her earlier work and this outstanding new collection, at peeling back the surface layer of existence and giving us a glimpse of what lies behind it. Although it is not often pretty, she proceeds without fear.

“Dear Death” is the opening letter (or poem) where she asks Death to “pretend you forget all about us.” She is out riding bikes with children, visiting the first graders with “gap-toothed smiles,” and learning about penguins. It is the essence of innocence with Death standing right in the moment. McGookey is not a pessimist, but a realist who understands how fragile life is. Death is not a scary presence in her poetry unless you find the mere concept of Death scary. McGookey’s Death drives to a school Valentine party in his red pick up. “…you’re welcome to braid a friendship bracelet and balance an Oreo on your forehead. Cupcakes go next to the juice boxes.” And she reassures Death, who may feel uncomfortable in the midst of such life. “It’s ok if you don’t exactly fit in. No one wants to believe you are here.”

But Death is here and McGookey explores the impact as she writes about grief. In “The Grief Jacket Project” we find a committee combining different materials to create “a wearable jacket that physically protects and comforts mourners” — sea turtle eggs, small river rocks. In the end, barn swallows provide inspiration and they create a jacket that volunteers would like to pass on to their loved ones. The issue not addressed is why they would need not need such a jacket themselves? In another poem (“At the John Ball Zoo”) she wonders when she’ll be done with grief. And, then, “When will I say, Grief, do you miss me, too?” Like Death, Grief is a presence.

McGookey has explored these ideas before, very clearly in Stay, but she avoids repetition. They are concepts ripe and deep that she may delve into for a long time. In Stay, much of her thinking revolved around her parents, but here Death and childhood are intertwined. Childhood is a magical place of everyday joys and distant fears, where children grow in the flower bed, and where a son escapes the day in a bird suit. And she ends the collection with a “P.S. Death” where her daughter hands her a crumpled page from her first-grade unit on space, not knowing that the elderly neighbor who watched her swim, died that day. She knows her daughter would engage death, but she wants to protect her. Her final line to Death says “I don’t want you to feel at home here.”

If you have not entered McGookey’s world, you are missing a place both familiar and strange. It is a world where we can wander through the possible, the unsaid, and the unacknowledged, and emerge back into our lives with a new perspective.