The Heart Never Pretends to Be a Beautiful Muscle by Amanda Hartzell

The Heart Never Pretends to Be a Beautiful Muscle is an Ouroboros of the tangible and uncanny. In this visceral collection by Amanda Hartzell, every pleasure features a knifed edge—ice cream cones are delivered by the drowning, and the birds themselves are murderous. These poems are compelling in the eerie manner of a siren song. The equal treatment of real and imagined elements, in addition to works’ the hyperfixation on the body, guarantee that readers will be lured. Amanda Hartzell’s surreal debut chapbook, The Heart Never Pretends to Be a Beautiful Muscle begs us to consider: are we human, animal, or monstrous?
–Rachael Inciarte, Poet/Author of What Kind of Seed Made You

“To read The Heart Never Pretends to be a Beautiful Muscle by Amanda Hartzell is to open a box of jewels and to peer through hundreds of colorful facets into the world we think we know and discover that we do not quite. Each poem in this rich and surreal collection forces the unfamiliar out of hiding into intimate moments we only thought we could describe. Antelope eating popsicles, the body unrecognizable “speaking from its shape like a body“, monsters who know our names, gardens of ephemera innumerable, wild and thriving— are some of the images that will leave this book with you. One of Hartzell’s many strengths is that her work furthers both quest and question giving space to revelation and re-visioned realities, which blossom, uproot and -at once- become familiar. These are poems a reader will carry, and when the poems resurface with all their little prisms and angles of light, you will believe they’ve always been there, waiting and hiding but never missing.
–Kristian Macaron, author of Recipe for Time Travel in Case We Lose Each Other