The Haywire Heart and Other Musings on Love by Rachel Anna Neff

Rachel Neff‘s poems stir an ache in the belly, a sense of longing that is familiar and primal—for love, for understanding, and for home. Her voice exudes an unwavering strength of character; a girl emerges and a woman rises. Her chapbook is a striking 21st-century coming-of-age story in verse.

–Tabitha Blankenbiller, author of Eats of Eden

In Haywire Heart Rachel Anna Neff has rendered a new mythology from a miscellany of archetypal heartbreak and modern-day breakups—love and its often cruel proximities are cut up and stitched back together again in a patchwork of profound juxtapositions. Neff ‘s poetry “obfuscates the connection between reality and memory” and, paradoxically, brings into focus some of the truths about love and the beguiling falsities we mistake for love. These poems, these spaces where “bones break like hearts,” contain many moments of heartache and grief over lost and halted loves, but they also inhabit a place where “love is more than what we lose,” and, that being the case, Neff’s poetic world is not a bleak one, but one of endurance and compassion and power.

–Steve Lambert, author of Heat Seekers

Rachel Anna Neff‘s poetry brings old myths to life in a bright new light. Her work is steeped in legend and history, but always embodies Ezra Pound’s edict to “Make it new.” The Haywire Heart and Other Musings on Love is a chapbook that puts a fresh face on the love poem.

–Allyson Whipple, author of Come Into the World Like That