Today I have the absolute pleasure on inviting Giovanna MacKenna to reflect on her stunning debut collection How the Heart Can Falter (The Museum of Loss and Renewal Publishing, 2022).

Thank you for the invitation, Nigel. What author can resist an opportunity to talk about their book?! I’m delighted to be given this space to offer some insights into my collection How the Heart can Falter, and one poem in particular. As I see it, we all have our stories to tell; they are the mirrors of our lives. With this book I hold up mine in the hope that the readers may also see themselves.

Although I’ve been writing in one way or another for a long time, poetry really came to me in the months after my mother’s death. My father died many years before but there seemed to be some sort of permission that arrived with…