Here, We Bury the Hearts by Dom Fonce

Here, We Bury the Hearts presents us with an apparent paradox: how can a book with so many ghosts and graves, with so much that is buried and by-gone, be so full of life and make us see the world as a space of vital purpose?  The answer lies in the energy and breadth of Dom Fonce’s language, imagination, and heart, which persistently return us to the living present avid for the gifts it can give.  These poems declare, with enormous subtlety and skill, that the heart is on the side of life and will not be buried.

–Steven Reese, author of Excentrica: Notes on the Text (BlazeVox, 2017)

Dom Fonce’s collection Here, We Bury the Hearts examines loss in Ohio—the state coined “The Heart of It All.” This collection mourns the death of a father in Youngstown against the backdrop of historic Ohio burials—Eugene in the Sabina Cemetery, Margaret Schilling at The Ridges in Athens, and The Great Serpent Mound in Adams County. The meditation on loss in Youngstown extends beyond the human into the postindustrial— “Portrait of Youngstown as the Archetypal Fallen Kingdom” opens with “In this scene, a cemetery, big as three towns, must sit /in the middle of the canvas.” Yet the speaker is undaunted, ready to “howl at the moon and dig up graves with my back paws” “for the love of the city.” Fonce’s powerful poems are heir to the larger tradition of burial poems that “dig out a path with a shovel/passed down from generation to generation.”

–Allison Pitinii Davis, author of Line Study of a Motel Clerk (Baobab Press, 2017)