Hand on My Heart

by Anara Guard

Poetry collection

Genres: Poetry

52 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2019

About the author

Anara Guard no longer uses Goodreads (although may return if and when greater oversight of review-bombers, fake profiles, and other falsehoods is provided). She grew up in Chicago where her first job was tending the corner newsstand for a penny a minute while Carl the Newspaper Man ate his lunch at Steinway's drug store. Her debut novel LIKE A COMPLETE UNKNOWN was published in March 2022. She studied writing at Urban Gateways Young Writers Workshop of Chicago with Kathleen Agena, Idyllwild School of Music and the Arts with Norman Corwin, St. Joseph's College with Stu Dybek, Bread Loaf Writers Conference with Robert Cohen and Alix Ohlin, and the Community of Writers. She graduated from Kenyon College and Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science in Boston. She is also the author of two collections of short stories, "Remedies for Hunger" (2014) and "The Sound of One Body" (2010), as well as a poetry collection, "Hand on My Heart" (2019). In 2024, a second poetry collection will be published by The Poetry Box. She lives in northern California with her husband and yard dragon.

Reviews

[Lennart Lundh · Rating 5 out of 5]

In its thirty-six free-verse poems, Anara Guard’s collection, Hand on my Heart, unflinchingly approaches the narrator’s personal and public lives, complete with joys and tragedies both mundane and spiritual. Serious and direct, Guard consistently fills her ruminations with wonderful images. The language is clear and carefully chosen, the subjects and references cross-generational.

“Yes, She Knew” speaks to Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan,” answering what the poet sees as its central question quickly and directly, following with vivid imagery as proof:

They flew above the forests
heaving with rain,
and she watched the flamingos dance
their pink seduction.
She saw the deserts,
scraped clean to the bone.

In contrast, “>45” answers its question, “What is greater than forty-five?” by way of a clever, and clearly political, list poem that always and never names its subject:

Bottles of beer on the wall
Cards in a deck, even after we remove all the jokers

Colors in the big box of crayons
Native American nations

before concluding, “what is greater than 45? // We are.”

After “Hole in My Head” reminds us of the fragility of memories (“Where is that word? / I need it to fill a hole / in my heart.”), “Regret” warns, through their similarity to a garden, against failing to deal with them in time:

I have waited too long to prune
and my roses have grown tangled
and straggly. They resist
all efforts to tame them now.

Miscarriages and drownings. Recycling. Love, with its resilience or departure. The inevitable growth of a child and the lessons contained therein. Hand on My Heart is a marvelous gathering of Life’s examples to us, deserving from start to finish of your time.

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About the reviewer:
Lennart Lundh is a poet, short-fictionist, historian, and photographer. His work has appeared internationally since 1965.

[Dorothy Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anara Guard's poetry collection Hand on My Heart is varied and rewarding, full of details, images and sensations that bring the past to life in ways that are relatable, touching and that ring true.