Published Work
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.
The Anatomist, Dr. Antonio Maria Valsalva, Converses with His Young Bride Over Supper
Bologna, Italy, 1709
was spawned, Elena, by my father’s ear
out of which quite often flowed a strain
of viscous pus-filled fluid. Yes, my dear,
of course I tasted it, for I fathomed
even then that physicians should use every
sense in their diagnostics. Yet imagine
the sour tingling on my tongue no slurry
of oak bark blunted until the day grew
late. . . . Yes, yes, I see. . . . You now aim
to prevent my testing any cadaver’s glue
if I wish to kiss you? How shall I claim
cures for the living with such a constriction?
Are you ill, wife?—or having a tantrum?
Review of Luz Bones
“Myrna Stone’s depth of historical knowledge and talent for storytelling should not in any way suggest that her technical skills don’t reach the pay grade of poetry’s big leagues, far from it. Wherefore art thou wherewithal to learn, listen, and savor? God help the inattentive reader. An Ohioan, Stone has four other collections in circulation and counts Poetry, The Southwest Review, Quarterly West, and numerous other journals as friends of her work.”
-Matt Sutherland, Forward Reviews, May/June 2017 issue
Praise for Luz Bones
“Stone, a vocal chameleon, performs remarkable ventriloquisms, through which the poems enact a complex of multiple inspirations—not only by the characters who ghost these pages, but also by Stone, who at once is haunted by and haunts her subjects.”
“In her chiseled arrangement of dramatic monologues, Myrna Stone brackets her historical imaginations in poems of personal loss, as if to make of intimate tragedy an “earthen door” that leads deep into and away from lives long past. Thus the sacramental union of gratitude and mourning, witness and invention, magnanimity and art. A deeply moving and masterful book.”