Heart Like Leaves

Barbara Novack is Writer-in-Residence and member of the English Department at Molloy University. She founded and hosts Poetry Events there and, off-campus, presents highly regarded creative writing programs and workshops. Her books include the novel J. W. Valentine, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and finalist for Pushcart Press Editor's Book Award, full-length poetry collections Something Like Life, and Dancing on the Rim of Light, and chapbooks Do Houses Dream? and A Certain Slant of Light, both finalists for the Blue Light Press Poetry Prize.










I am so moved by these poems, this book. It is a work written by a poet with an enormous heart and a fine talent for expressing emotions, for making them exquisitely relatable.

A book of love and loss that teaches as it reveals, Heart Like Leaves shares wisdom and offers comforting arms. There is, in this collection, a sense of bravery-not exactly strength, certainly not a false bravura, but a willingness to open, to disclose, to describe and to share emotions of pain and loss and the acceptance of the you who remains to begin an altered path, to carve out of unknown cloth the person you have to become.

Whether you have experienced great loss or not, you will find familiar moments in this book as you gain the insight and the armor needed to be a human being in this life.

- Dd. Spungin, author of Tomorrow Smells Invisible



Barbara Novack, a fine poet and bereaved sister, shares her personal path of love, grief, and loss in a powerful collection of poems to heal her broken spirit. These poignant poems honor her brother's memory and offer inspiration to all who have cared for and lost loved ones.

- Anne Dupré, author of Where Dreams Live



In Heart Like Leaves, Barbara Novack gives us forty-one lyrical, beautifully written, profoundly moving poems about loss and grieving as she journeys through the illness and death of a beloved brother. This is brave poetry that never backs down in the face of unspeakable loss: sometimes nightmarish, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes heartrendingly beautiful, but always honest, clear, and steadfast, and in the end consoling where consolation at first seemed impossible.

- Mary Mackey, author of The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams, winner of the 2019 Eric Hoffer Small Press Award



Barbara Novack is an incredible poet with incredible insight into life's situation and emotion.

- Lorraine LoFrese Conlin, Nassau County Poet Laureate 2015-2017