Where It Hurts

The dreaming speaker in Jon Ballard’s ＂Having Learned Nothing＂ tells us he suspects that loss itself is the crucial theme on which he is being tested. This might be true for all of us, the major leitmotif of Where It Hurts which speaks to the heart - the heart that is always lurking at the edge of Ballard’s poetry, if not standing spotlighted centerstage. So often, there’s an implicit sadness even in the most mundane circumstances: a wedding reception, a dental appointment or, God forbid, a diagnosis of terminal cancer. But there’s also humor waiting to break out, as if life is ＂Always a Musical,＂ indeed. Or, as he writes in ＂Mid-Year Reset,＂ ＂Start learning to wear guilt so well / people badger you for the name / of your tailor.＂

-Charles Rammelkamp, author, See What I Mean?and The Trapeze of Your Flesh

An autumnal feeling hovers over Jon Ballard’s latest, austerely lovely collection, Where It Hurts. Not so much Keats’s ＂Season of mists...＂ but Richard Wilbur’s ＂In the Elegy Season,＂ as when Ballard writes in ＂Late November Dusk,＂ ＂so near is the season of resolutions.＂ It’s the feeling that things are ending, and not always well, that gives Where It Hurtsits heft, like the phrase, ＂...pilgrim from my past...＂ in ＂Time Capsule,＂ or this, from the poem ＂Assassin: ＂ ＂long-time assassin of the heart.＂ The beauty in these poems lies in their unsentimental nature, their ability to face loss and hurt and to keep on going, and even in their wry wit, as in the poem ＂After Dinner, We Advance: ＂ ＂I warn you then I’m out / of practice in the art of seduction.＂

-Robert Cooperman, author, In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains, Colorado Book Award for Poetry winner

Jon Ballard’s Where It Hurts pulls readers into moments both intimate and haunting, where the mundane and the profound collide. With unflinching honesty and lyrical grace, these poems explore life’s fragility and resilience. ＂Like a lost limb’s phantom throb,＂ this collection lingers in the heart and mind long after turning the final page.

-Eric D. Goodman, author, Faraway TablesandTracks