The Heart Explained

by Elaine Sexton

FRANK
The most beautiful thing about the mail is
reception, and the most beautiful thing
about reception is truth, and truth is
justice is honesty, personified, and honesty is
the heart explained, and words
explain reason, and reason matters, is
particular, is personal, as is what we post and sort
and deliver, and delivery is story is voice is
song, and song is country is search is pride.

Elaine Sexton is a maker, critic, teacher, and librettist. The Post Office: An Opera in Poems is her sixth collection of poetry, and first libretto, written in collaboration with composer Laura Kaminsky. The Post Office will debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Arts in May 2026. Her poems are widely anthologized and published in journals including American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and O! the Oprah Magazine. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, former senior editor of ARTnews, and visual arts editor for Tupelo Quarterly, her art and book reviews have appeared in Art in America, ARTnews, Art New England, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and On the Seawall. Sexton lives in New York and teaches at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute. elainesexton.org