Mock Heart, Jill Bialosky
Mock Heart, Jill Bialosky
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Mock Heart
New & Selected Poems

Author: Jill Bialosky

Narrator: Jill Bialosky

Unabridged: TBD

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/08/2026

Synopsis

A career-spanning volume of the poet’s work charts the seasons of a woman’s life through desire and motherhood, grief and the consolations of poetry

“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

Bialosky’s poems, “always intently alive with lyrical truths” (Yusef Komunyakaa), weave tragedy, language, and perception in poignant works of personal and public exploration. In Mock Heart, a powerful gathering of her work thus far, she opens with a cache of searing new poems and proceeds backward in time through selections from her five previous collections. We move from lyric sections of the acclaimed Asylum, a work that reveals personal and historical traumas and how we search for understanding in their wake, to the folly of The Players, about a son’s maturing into manhood in a space of intimate wonder, to Intruder, a haunting exploration of passion and its myths, to Subterranean, a book of maternal yearning, and finally we arrive back at her debut, The End of Desire, probing the mysteries of girlhood, premonitions of loss, and the temptations and challenges of becoming. 

A daring poet of lyric mastery, one who delves into the spaces where desire blooms, Bialosky is never content to rest on the laurels of the beauty she finds around her. Throughout her journey, sorrow and loss as well as joy feed the earned wisdom that finished poems will bestow.

About The Author

Jill Bialosky’s newest work of prose is The End Is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother. Her most recent volume of poetry, Asylum: A Personal, Historical, Natural Inquiry in 103 Lyric Sections, was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. She is the author of five acclaimed collections of poetry, four critically acclaimed novels—most recently The Deceptions, a finalist for the Gotham Book Prize—and two memoirs, Poetry Will Save Your Life and the New York Times bestselling History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker; The Atlantic; Harper’s Magazine; O, the Oprah Magazine; The Kenyon Review; Harvard Review; The Paris Review; and The Best American Poetry, among others. She coedited with Helen Schulman the anthology Wanting a Child. She is an executive editor and vice president at W. W. Norton & Company. In 2014 she was honored by the Poetry Society of America for her distinguished contribution to poetry.

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Quotes

“To read Jill Bialosky’s Mock Heart: New & Selected Poems is to explore the lyric opulence of a life lived at the nexus of beauty and its blood sister, loss. Beginning with the most recent poems, sharp-edged, elegantly crafted, and wise, we transcend retrospectively toward the earliest work, plumbing the origin story via ‘time’s strange, mysterious alienation’—seasonal time, erotic time, interiority’s whirling facets, beauty, impromptu and fleeting, and grief-without-end. On those nights in which I doubt poetry’s efficacy, I will turn to this collection to arrive again at the last poem’s final line— ‘I was afraid’—and to feel in alliance with that austere vulnerability. Mock Heart leads us all the way to the very real heart of a palpable human being.” —Diane Seuss, author of frank: sonnets and Modern Poetry

“Mock Heart, Jill Bialosky’s superb new volume, holds both exquisite new and brilliantly selected earlier poems, offering readers the formal equipoise we love in Bishop and Strand, as well as her deep, elegiac tenderness, which touches and informs all her poetry. Whether engaging the complexities of motherhood, the transports of desire or the resistance of experience to the making of art, these thirty years of Jill Bialosky’s poetic works stand as a testament to our faith—and the poet’s—in the act of poetry as the most compelling mirror of our reckless yet faithful human hearts.” —David St. John, author of Prayer for My Daughter

”Jill Bialosky’s brilliant poems celebrate things of this world with an intense clarity that links them to the mind that bears griefs along with joys. Her vision is of the world’s beauties and cruelties existing side by side, earthly wonders along with far-reaching violence, madness, and injustice. It’s the beauties that remain, as in the lyrical sonnets at the start of the book. Bialosky ranges in her accurate observations of daily life, though her deepest concern is the human heart. I reach for this book in these troubled times.” —Grace Schulman, author of Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems

“‘All of us, humans, plants, birds, deer, are made of matter,’ Jill Bialosky writes in a glorious new poem, a tribute to Lucretius, ‘The Nature of Things.’ Bialosky has for decades taken the measure of lived life in all its phases, creating some of the greatest contemporary poems about being a child, a lover, a wife, a mother, a daughter, a sister. Her voice is wry, curious, tender, and then suddenly expansive; her intellect is rigorous, a little skeptical; she writes like a dream both in and out of forms. Bialosky’s new poems give evidence of a poet at the very top of her powers.” —Dan Chiasson, author of The Math Campers

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