Myrna Stone, the author of The Casanova Chronicles, a memorable sequence that is one of the best long poems in recent years, has moved from Casanova to her own father—and chronicled the texture of a relationship as well as the texture of a mind gone to ruin. These conversational sonnets demonstrate the elasticity of a form devoted to love; Stone also shows us that some of our greatest love stories are not the ones we expected. ~ Kim Bridgford Myrna Stone's "In the Present Tense" is a powerful work—not just because it chronicles the last, difficult years of her very elderly father ( in first class sonnets), but because of the sweep she achieves in documenting the orbit of all those involved: from family members to other assisted living patients. It's a breadth that only the best writers can acheive—sadness, yes, but also wisdom, fortitude, love, and even humor. As one of the sons whispers to his fading father, remembering the father's love of fishing: "Dad, it's time to catch the big one"—so does Myrna Stone catch what it's really like to deal with these tragic circumstances, and who continues to show why poetry, and her poems, are absolutely necessary. ~ Tim Suermondt

In the Present Tense: Portraits of My Father

Literature & Fiction

Stone, Myrna

Poetry

White Violet Press

The title of this collection states the central theme―the losses that accrue over time and the ways in which this particular poetic persona deals with these losses: the loss of loved ones; of faith; of innocence―losses of both a personal, and of a larger, historical nature―losses that simultaneously deplete and elevate. These poems argue that memory is the servant of time, and that the work of memory is "a construct of mirror and shadow" transforming and distilling events until they achieve the status of myth ("Simulacrum"). Put another way, the poems suggest that in the moment something happens, it is already becoming memory, taking the first steps toward myth, neither wholly fiction nor fact, but inhabiting the gray area between. It is into this gray area that the poems look aslant―as though the poetic persona is walking away, looking back over her shoulder―using heightened, lyrical language to describe the commonplace and familiar―a childhood kitchen; a quiet room at dusk; the ritual of Saturday confession; the natural world; the artistic impulse―each filtered through, and mythologized by, the passage of time.

The Art of Loss: Poems by Myrna Stone

Michigan State University Press

Poetry. "Myrna Stone, in HOW ELSE TO LOVE THE WORLD, seems to ask what can redeem 'the addle and dross the hours devise' (her fine phrase from the title poem). One answer the book provides is 'this carnal life,' whether manifested in human touch or on painted canvas ('stroke of flesh and brush'). The scenes depicted may be tawdry or elegant, voluptuous or corrupt, but Stone's writing is always crisp with precision and civility. Her forms are as diverse as the painters she calls up, from Bruegel to John Singer Sargent. Reading Stone, I think of John Donne. Like him, she delights in wit and desire and the sweet coupling of word and word"--Elton Glaser.

How Else to Love the World

Browser Books Publishing

"In this wild, sexy, exuberantly off-the-wall collection, parrots, puppets, and the great Casanova take turns force-feeding Viagra to the stuffy old sonnet. But it's Myrna Stone's Rabelaisian gift for language that really steals the show. My head's still spinning."—George BilgereIn this book of voices, speakers resurrected from the deeper past and the dead chafe against the circumstances of love, sex, loss, and longing.Myrna Stone is the author of two poetry books—How Else to Love the World and The Art of Loss—and the recipient of a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship and an Ohio Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry.

The Casanova Chronicles

Etruscan Press

In Luz Bones, a collection of wild, intense, and fiercely-crafted sonnets and other poems, Myrna Stone takes us on a journey through time and the psyche, that is both novelistic and deeply lyrical. The range of voices—from Martin Luther's to Mae West's—explores both mortality and what might lie beyond it.
Myrna Stone is the author of five books of poetry, including In the Present Tense: Portraits of My Father, which was a finalist for the 2014 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry. She has received two Ohio Arts Council Grants, and the 2001 Ohio Poet of the Year Award.

Luz Bones

About the Author\nMyrna Stone is the author of five previous full-length books of poetry: Luz Bones (Etruscan Press, 2017); In the Present Tense: Portraits of My Father (White Violet Press, 2013), a finalist for the 2014 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; The Casanova Chronicles (Etruscan Press, 2010), a finalist for the 2011 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; How Else to Love the World (Browser Book Publishing, 2007); and The Art of Loss (Michigan State University Press, 2001), for which she was named 2001 Ohio Poet of the Year. She has received three Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards in Poetry, a Full Fellowship to Vermont Studio Center, the 2017 New Letters Poetry Prize, and the 2002 Poetry Award from Weber, The Contemporary West. In 2015 she presented five morning lectures on Poetry as a member of the faculty of the Antioch Writers' Workshop.\nWithin these pages Myrna Stone explores both love and death and the matters of the heart to which they are inextricably tied. The lost brother, the mother taken too early, the grieving widower, and the other women, real and invented, who too often overshadowed by their fathers, lovers, husbands, or sons, are at last given their own historical and emotional due. Whether they speak from their own lives in dramatic monologues, through the narrator's voice, or through her own, Stone brings them each alive in these fleshed-out poems of breadth and breath.

The Resurrectionist's Diary

United States

DOS Madres Pr

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