O, Heart

Poetry. "At the center of this fabulous tale of the human heart a tale at once historical, scientific, musical, literary is a wrenched lyric cry, the cry of a particular woman in a particular place, the place uncharted, the woman floating between the remembered ecstasies of youth and the unforeseen rigors of age: I break my heart all by myself. Like the tutelary spirits she conjures—Bronte, Dickinson, Bowles—, Claudia Keelan prefers the heart broken, and the extravagant, multi-voiced drama of O, HEART is itself the evidence that, once broken, the heart is never alone."—James Longenbach