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

“The recycled Beloved / Her heart turns to tragedy, turns away” Tweet

“The woman is not a ruin” Tweet

Watch O, Heart at the Black Mountain Institute

First Acts

The woman is alone on the stage

“His eye would trouble me no more…”

What was in Poe’s heart
That all his tales express the outward
Murder or death of something—

Old men, eyes, Ligeia, hearts, etc—
While the narrator goes quickly crazy himself,
Embodied and disembodied, in the act?

“Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased…”

And no one can tell if it’s his
Or the old man’s, though it becomes clear—
Nothing becomes clear.

In the 19th century,
People believed that emotions
Came from the heart
But now we know
That they come from the brain—
Emotions, and that helps us—

Ahab and his whale,
Hawthorne and “The Birthmark”
And The Scarlet Letter,
All these signs signifying

The Red Badge of Courage

Every girl loves a coward
Kate swimming out to sea
At the end of The Awakening,
Swimming away from possession,
Swimming into the possession
Of her own heart,
Which drowns her

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ISBN: 9780989329620