Open Heart

Invoking both the trauma of major surgery at age three and the possession of a passionate nature, Open Heart invites readers to see its title as an emblem for both center and home. While lamenting an itinerant life, "never knowing even at the age of sixty where / you might land where / you might feel at home", Nicole Farmer explores the complex ache of raising daughters who, of course, will leave home for their own difficult journeys. But we also accompany the poet through the pleasures of driving at night, generational dancing, sweeping away spiderwebs, even riding through a kaleidoscopic car wash. Sit down with this fine book, and you will take to heart its "wonder / and know its longing".

-Kenneth Chamlee, author of If Not These Things and The Best Material for the Artist in the World-Albert Bierstadt: A Biography in Poems

Nicole Farmer's Open Heart is equal parts loss and exhilaration, saturated with humor, passion, and aching vulnerability. From sensual love to challenges of mother-daughter relationships, her poems embrace joy and discomfort, asking, "Is it possible that / once cut, the pain of healing could feel like home?" In this compact collection, Farmer manages to traverse an emotional spectrum and explore what it means to be a human in a body capable of great love and great loss, ready to wildly embrace the world with an open heart.

-Whitney Waters, Creative Writing professor at Western North Carolina University

No doubt you come to Open Heart anticipating its openness, the startling honesty with which Farmer drums her own world's heartbeat. But what you might not have anticipated is its range-that these poems are at once tender and torrential, wit and wild wonder. With each poem, Farmer demonstrates the complexity with which she builds "the mother." Her bricks: the profound attention for surprising subjects-Southern Belles, "sinewy spiders", and the eroticness of rain. These poems, at once body and bawdy, illustrate Farmer's deft hand in managing poetry between restraint and the need to take a leap.

-Dr. Diamond Forde, author of Mother Body