My Heart Is a Museum is Laurie Filipelli's third poetry collection, a sequence of prose poems moving between a declining glove-making town in upstate New York and burgeoning present-day Austin. Filipelli treats the past as something endlessly reformatted, by turns myth, archive, social feed, and bodily symptom, while writing with documentary precision and a wry, unsentimental ear, drawing family migration, reproductive loss, and political exhaustion into one continuous account. Presiding over it are colossal women who refuse the limits of culturally assigned meanings.
 
Praise for My Heart Is a Museum:
My Heart Is a Museum maps the topography of loss—of what happens when you no longer recognize the place you're from or the place where you live. In these poems—at once beautiful and strange, delicate and angry, lyrical and deeply grounded—Laurie Filipeli explores dusty thrift store shelves, bits of Americana, towns that were once grand and towns that fell into disrepair, what we discard and what we keep. Through an old-fashioned viewfinder, she turns her gaze on memory, history, and myth, offering a threnody for what has been lost while refusing to surrender to despair.
   — Irena Smith
 
My Heart is a Museum builds the speaker’s history from the precise fragments she unearths—leather gloves, fishless reservoirs, a goddess atop a Capitol dome. These poems brim with a clear-eyed warmth that is free from nostalgia, and insist on hope for change, despite always-long odds. Filipelli has created a gorgeous refraction of an American life.   
   — Stacey Swann
 
ABOUT Laurie Filipelli:
Laurie Filipelli is a poet, writer, and educator. She has authored two collections of poetry: Elseplace (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2013), and the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Discovery Prize winner, Girl Paper Stone (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in various literary journals, but she is most proud of her first publication, a poem stapled in large cut-out letters to her elementary school’s bulletin board. She lives in Austin, runs a college admissions coaching business, and publishes the Mighty Writing newsletter on Substack.