A Daughter’s Work Is Heartless by Nature by Caledonia Kearns

In the title poem of this deeply female book, a mother counsels: “But loss can be learned. It just takes practice. Don’t look back. Eat the six seeds.” There is a legacy of loss at the heart of these poems which are haunted by the past but fiercely in the present. Kearns is a big-hearted storyteller with a fiction writer’s sense of conflict and intriguing opening “hooks” (“There was no choice but to bet on the filly.”)  A Daughter’s Work is Heartless by Nature crackles with the energies of neighborhood, the gorgeous vitality of Brooklyn.  Fueled by hunger, outrage, and a tender generosity, it is alive to the difficult questions—and beauties—of our ordinary day-to-day struggles.

–Donna Masini

“Love” seems too pallid a word for the wrenching human connections laid bare here and “beautiful” seems too weak a word for the spiky intensity of Caledonia Kearns’ poetry.  And yet at the core are love and beauty, hard-won and bracingly real.

–Katha Pollitt

As I started to read Caledonia Kearns’ “A Daughter’s Work Is Heartless by Nature”, I thought, this is what you get when a poet fires on all cylinders. All of these poems snap, crackle and refresh, without an ounce of extra baggage, and like all useful verse lead a reader to revelation; you think you’ve seen New York, but now you discover all the small, overlooked eddies that had slipped your eye, ear and memory; she takes the fractures of a marriage, and uncovers truthful music as it breaks. When I finished reading, I thought Caledonia Kearns has written a book that will be read, admired, and passed along.