The Heart is a Muscle is born! Cue party poppers and happy dancing—and cringing and whinging.
While I’m mostly used to new book releases (though I’m still stoked and in awe every time I complete a book and share it with the world), I wasn’t prepared for the extreme nervousness that’s holding hands with my happiness today.
Sharing my writing always feels slightly scary (and used to feel utterly terrifying), though I’m one of those lucky people who has a good game face and can generally seem at ease with everything. And over the years, sharing my novels has gotten easier: all the fun, waaaaay less of the fear and anxiety. Sharing my first poetry collection, however? Eeek. It feels very vulnerable. And maybe that’s the point. Being a human is very vulnerable.
Life is complex, and I’ve found that in order to survive it, I’ve had to make peace with and hold a lot of contradictory emotions. And poetry helps.
If you’re familiar with my novels, you know that the rub of human existence is a theme I explore often: how joy and deep, profound, incredible beauty coexists with horrible things and excruciating experiences and situations. The poems that I, Angie Dorsey, and Nancy Davies chose for The Heart is a Muscle grew out of that coexistence as well, and as its longer title promises, throughout its pages, in various forms and ways, light and dark, we explore love, pain (though, in hindsight, perhaps grief would’ve been a more apt word), healing, and joy.
It’s that last state—joy—that really speaks to me now. As a younger poet, it was always pain, hardship, and rage—my own and that of the world at large—that fueled my pen. I still feel those emotions (and myriad others) deeply, and denying them or trying to avoid them is impossible (and arguably, unhealthy), but more and more it’s the light side of the shadows—that I also feel so, so intensely and am so grateful for—that I long to somehow portray, share, explore.
And on that note, I excitedly (and yep, still trepidatiously) present of our collection of poems about just some of the experiences and emotions of being human. I so hope you enjoy our offerings!
You can find The Heart is a Muscle in eBook from the from the vendor of your choice here.
It is also available widely in paperback and will soon be winging its way to Misty River Books!
And if you’d like a signed copy, please reach out to me at ev_bishopATSIGNyahoo.com. I’d love to sell you one and ship it to you personally. ❤️
