Myrna Stone
 
 

Luz Bones

—those bones comprising the coccyx, or tailbone,
which according to legend are the last to decay
in the grave, thereby seemingly immortal
Inside my father's, in life, staphylococcus
once colonized itself after its descent 
from his heart, each rude metropolis
inhabiting a segment where pain, nascent,

then perverse, afflicted him for months.
And in my own, during both labors,
grew a torment that, remembered, stuns
me still. A Jewish tale says that the sabers

of Death neither rattle nor slay in the city 
of Luz, all that God saved of Paradise 
here, where dwellers live an eternity
unbound from the onus of sin. No device

is given the rest of us but to envision
the body's smallish afterlife: a core
of bones—five or less, brown or ashen,
ordered or erratic—within an earthen door.
 
 
 
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Books of Poetry
by Myrna Stone

 
 
 

The Resurrectionist’s Diary

Within these pages Myrna Stone explores both love and death and the matters of the heart to which they are inextricably tied. The lost brother, the mother taken too early, the grieving widower, and the other women, real and invented, who too often overshadowed by their fathers, lovers, husbands, or sons, are at last given their own historical and emotional due. Whether they speak from their own lives in dramatic monologues, through the narrator's voice, or through her own, Stone brings them each alive in these fleshed-out poems of breadth and breath.

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Luz Bones

In Luz Bones, a collection of wild, intense, and fiercely-crafted sonnets and other poems, Myrna Stone takes us on a journey through time and the psyche that is both novelistic and deeply lyrical. The range of voices—from Martin Luther's to Mae West's—explores both mortality and what might lie beyond it.

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In the Present Tense:
Portraits of My Father

In the most personal of all her books and the most wrenching to write, Myrna Stone chronicles her father's long, charmed, and often difficult life to its inevitable end.

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How Else
To Love the World

What can redeem “the addle and dross the hours devise?” Stone asks. One answer she provides here is “this carnal life,” whether manifested in human touch or in the “stroke of flesh and brush” on painted canvas.

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The Casanova Chronicles

In this book of voices, speakers resurrected from the deeper past and the dead chafe against the circumstances of love, sex, loss, and longing.

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The Art of Loss

In her debut collection, Myrna Stone catalogues the losses that accrue over time and the ways in which we deal with these losses: the loss of loved ones; of faith; of innocence—losses of both a personal, and of a larger, historical nature—losses that simultaneously deplete and elevate.

 
 

Sample Poetry

Myrna Stone’s poems have been featured in journals, on websites and public radio, and in many other media. A wide sampling of her poetry can be found online.

 
 
 
 

There has not been, nor shall not be
birdsong as beguiling as John James
mocking a mocker in our chokecherry
tree

 
 
 
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About
Myrna Stone

Myrna Stone is the author of six books of poetry and a founding member of The Greenville Poets.

 
 
 
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