"Pardon My Heart is a lyrically complex, beautifully integrated collection that will no doubt appeal to a wide audience of readers. Jackson possesses a keen ability to document ideas of maturing love alongside a reckoning of hard-earned ideas about race in a stripped down, clear, and passionate diction that is balanced masterfully against his use of the sonnet form and related lyric modes."--Peter Covino, author of ​Cut Off the Ears of Winter and The Right Place to Jump

"Marcus's work isn't trying to follow any trends. He accomplishes a beauty through carefully constructed language that looks and sounds like conversational speech." --Anthony Frame, Editor in Chief, Glass: A Journal of Poetry

"In Pardon My Heart, Marcus Jackson's second poetry collection, the speaker finds many kinds of love--love that is joyful, but also love that is complicated by economic hardship, race, and time." --Poets Writers