Published Work
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.
Excerpt from The Resurrectionist’s Diary
Wednesday, 17 March, 1830
from pauper’s corner in the South End Burying Ground
a woman’s freshly interred body, her face a book
writ large in pain, and her two infant daughters
laid upon her breast, their torsos joined at the sternum,
each malformed and monstrous. In fields
such as these there are no obvious arrays of sorrow—
no mausoleums, vaults, urns, stones—the distressed earth
emblem enough of loss, which on the morrow
must needs be profit. If not the life John and I
envisaged, it is an enterprise that feeds and clothes us
and our boys. Want, we persuade ourselves, defies
all seemly creeds and our own human covenants
as Boston’s environs riddle with graves. Less than a day
hence, two more will be dug on the Tremont
side of the old Granary Grounds in a plot adjacent
to Park Street Church, their tenants a young Tuscan couple
of raw morals and strange beauty, lost in a blatant
act of ardor as their coachman ran amok. They,
like the mother and babes, are the very stuff of anatomists’
dreams and will not lack for buyers. Thus, John delays
supper tonight to prepare for tomorrow’s retrieval.
I hear him in the shed as I write, and Belle’s soft nickering
as he moves about her. Often I think if we do evil
in God’s eyes our good Belle is surely blind to it. . . .
Now comes the bells of shovels dropped in the wagon’s
bed, the whoosh of canvas tarps, the tick
and clatter of shuttered lanterns. . . . Our work
is not without risk, though we take only the dead, never
their goods, never their souls. Such is our worth.
Review of The Resurrectionist’s Diary
“The corpse snatched from the grave: this is the practical work of the resurrectionist—and the poet. In The Resurrectionist’s Diary, master formalist Myrna Stone takes us inside the lives of the dead and the barely living, but also inside the histories of great creators infusing life with art: a pregnant grave robber harvesting an elfin body; a grief-stricken Poe spiraling toward destruction; Vermeer’s wife, Catharina, chronicling the family’s destitution; the truths of Margherita Luti, Raphael’s secret wife, rising up from layers of paint. In these expertly crafted poems—beautiful containers for the dead—Stone unearths what we’ve buried deep, “rais[ing] a coffin of curiosities,” each life laid bare “in the perpetual now of the painting’s moment” or the telling face of a corpse, “a book writ large in pain.” How easily these narratives propel us into the present, where our own ghosts still haunt but where, also, the poet reminds us, “Mercy...has no expiration.” The Resurrectionist’s Diary is the elixir we need.”
-Marjorie Maddox, Author of Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation and True, False, None of the Above
Praise for The resurrectionist’s diary
“What do you get when you combine technical virtuosity, sound research, and an uncanny ability to channel the minds and souls of notable people? You get Myrna Stone’s The Resurrectionist’s Diary. These are breathtaking poems from multiple perspectives, starting with a body-snatching (“resurrectionist”) wife who describes the grisly trade of helping her husband dig up corpses, to Vermeer’s wife who shares her daybook entries, to fresh interpretations of Raphael’s artworks which hold mysteries of his secret lover, to a peek into the life of Edgar Allan Poe. Stone has long been recognized as a master of the formal poem, and her genius for re-envisioning historical figures is equally astonishing. But she also doesn’t shy away from her own heart, as in the book’s last section which explores the complicated landscape of family, loss, and personal trauma. Her poems invite us to connect with our own memories of those we’ve lost “across the void we share,” to consider the bittersweet passage of time with grace, and to, ultimately, embrace mercy.”
“The way 19th century body-snatchers dug up fresh graves for the medical profession to study the body’s anatomy, so in The Resurrectionist’s Diary Myrna Stone lifts up and arrays for our understanding the griefs and debts and devotions the living carry. Here those subjects are embodied in her signature persona poems, in dramatic monologues from the likes of one such body-snatcher, Vermeer’s wife, Edgar Allen Poe’s mothering aunt, Poe himself. Here is her gorgeous, language-driven craftwork in metered lines entwined with imaginative rhymes. Here, a must-read collection from a powerful and prolific formalist.”