Your Heart and How it Works

“The poems in this small book leave me a little breathless. They open up the sort of ecstatic moment I hope for, from poetry.  –Fleda Brown

‘Morning, Walking Home,’ ends, ‘Good morning, hands—/ you awake?  My sandal strap’s/ undone. My heart/ hardly buckled on.’ It’s that slight lurch, both in rhythm and in tone, that I love in JoAnn Balingit’s poems. They deconstruct love’s clichés, shrewdly celebrating the heart as a live object, more vulnerable and complicated than a machine, pumping blood also to itself. This is a poet who possesses both wisdom and talent. Our poetic landscape is richer for her presence.”                             —Fleda Brown, author of Driving With Dvořák and Loon Cry

“In these resonant poems, JoAnn Balingit shows us what is possible when the poet-mother, poet-wife, poet-poet allows herself to be gratefully confounded—allows herself, as Rilke told us, to truly love the questions. In this regard the irony of the title,Your Heart and How it Works, is just the sort of fulcrum and lever upon which these sometimes dark, often enchanting, always excellent poems extend.”  —Frank Giampietro, author of Begin Anywhere

Your Heart and How it Works received the 2010 Global Filipino Literary Award for poetry.  This chapbook is available at Amazon or contact JoAnn to order a copy.