It’s a bold move in contemporary poetry to make a guiding metaphor of hearts. Bolder still to do so through the lens of motherhood, a state still often framed as poetic niche despite the sheer commonness of the experience. In her second full-length collection, Sarah Venart transcends these concerns with poise and chutzpah. I Am the Big Heart follows the vectors of motherhood, love, longing, desire, and grief in ways that resist compartmentalization and easy viewing. 

Separating speaker from writer is fashionable—even advisable—but Venart’s book feels so resolutely embedded in autobiography that the distinction easily collapses. Indeed, this closeness between author and speaker gives the poems their vulnerability and sting. From the first pages, Venart roots herself firmly in the possibilities of her central metaphor: 

        And now everyone is arrow, arrow, arrows. Everyone harpoons.
And I am the big heart, aren’t I?

The heart is present both in this kind of metaphorical accessory language and in Venart’s bold vision, the audacity of which she admits to: “The heart being a thing that can mean everything / and nothing, a figurative opening.” In the face of this opening, she doesn’t flinch.

Venart’s skillful voice steers the book’s longings. Unornamented, though never plain, the language here is pointed, casual, and imagistic. The expression shifts easily from matter-of-fact to elegiac, making an emotional landscape as much of the pick-up line as of regret. There’s wryness here, too, particularly on the quotidian demands of motherhood: “Here I am in this tenth month, the peeler of pears.” Even in the raw grief of losing a mother, the mundane of being one encroaches: 

I didn’t have the deep thoughts

of a lake. Instead, I had the modest thoughts of a mother

Despite the focus on the commonplace—or perhaps because of it—this book is full of feeling. Here are poems about the sudden loss of one parent and the slow, degrading loss of another. Grief is complicated by sibling conflict and the imperfect love of a mother. Domestic squabbles, fraught childhoods, unwanted advances, dying pets, past lovers, and the speaker’s own desires inflect the daily work of love.

Linking the poems is an urge toward freedom and selfhood that powers the book narratively. The heart longs and the speaker remains a sensual being, a self concerned with the “backwoods of my radiance” and capable of “flowing / from domestic into feral / just like that.” In the final poem, the central figure appears alone at an art museum, for once unfettered, acting on the long-held desire to “see the tapestry’s hero running where she wants.” 

Ultimately, Venart creates a compelling map of the competing pulls on the heart of a mother, daughter, sister, writer, and lover. She is stirringly honest as she carves out unabashed space for selfhood. A hunger to be seen as someone both altered by and separate from circumstance reverberates throughout the book. Many readers will recognize themselves in these pages and appreciate the portrait’s intimacy and simple, unapologetic voice. In the end, as Venart says, 

I can’t save all of myself. But perhaps

what is most precious might be
perhaps perhaps preserved.

Sarah Wolfson is the author of A Common Name for Everything, which won the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Her poems have appeared in Canadian and American journals including The Walrus, The Fiddlehead, AGNI, TriQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, and PRISM International. Her work has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has received notable mention in Best Canadian Poetry. Originally from Vermont, she now lives in Montreal.