Mary Lee Bragg spent her childhood in rural southern Alberta, Canada, and was educated in Calgary. She now lives in Ottawa, where she had a career in the Canadian public service, focussing on official languages. Her award-winning poetry and short fiction have appeared in literary magazines and ezines in Canada, the United States and Cuba. She has published the novel Shooting Angels (2004) and two poetry chapbooks, How Women Work (2010) and Winter Music (2013). Her first collection of poetry, The Landscape That Isn’t There was published by Aeolus House Press in 2019. The three poems in this issue of Ascent are taken from the book’s middle section, Problems of the Heart, an extended sequence written while she was diagnosed and treated for heart failure.