JoAnn Balingit’s work has appeared in Harpur Palate, Salt Hill Journal, Smartish Pace and elsewhere, including the anthologies DIAGRAM.2 and Best New Poets 2007. She serves as Delaware’s poet laureate, appointed in 2008. She teaches poetry in schools and community organizations throughout the state and lives with her family in Newark.

Other poems by JoAnn Balingit in Verse Daily:

Books by JoAnn Balingit:

Other poems on the web by JoAnn Balingit:
"The Blue Spotted Salamander"
"Your Heart and How it Works"

JoAnn Balingit's Website.

JoAnn Balingit on Twitter.

About Your Heart and How it Works:

"In these resonant poems, JoAnn Balingit shows us what is possible when the poet-mother, poet-wife, poet-poet allows herself to be gratefully confounded—allows herself to, as Rilke told us, truly love the questions. In this regard, the irony of the title Your Heart and How it Works is just the sort of fulcrum and lever upon which these sometimes dark, often enchanting, always excellent poems extend."
—Frank Giampietro

"The poems in this small book leave me a little breathless. They open up the sort of ecstatic moment I hope for, from poetry. 'Morning, Walking Home,' ends, 'Good morning, hands—/ you awake? My sandal strap’s/ undone. My heart/ hardly buckled on.' It’s that slight lurch, both in rhythm and in tone, that I love in JoAnn Balingit’s poems. They deconstruct love’s clichés, shrewdly celebrating the heart as a live object, more vulnerable and complicated than a machine, pumping blood also to itself. This is a poet who possesses both wisdom and talent. Our poetic landscape is richer for her presence."
—Fleda Brown