The Boy Born with a Pinhole Heart
By Keith Gaboury

The Boy Born With A Pinhole Heart focuses on a Massachusetts boy who becomes a reborn man. As a boy at the beginning of the chapbook, he overcomes the emotional trauma from the death of his beloved grandparents. Following their deaths, challenges continue when his uncle dies, he’s confronted with a family member being molested as an altar boy, and his father loses his job. When his mother’s depression leads to hospice care, she ultimately dies. After his mother’s funeral, he moves from Massachusetts to San Francisco. However, in his new city, he spirals into alcoholism. Through all these family tragedies and personal flaws, he stands on a Pacific Ocean beach in the last poem. As waves break anew, he in turn is a new man breaking anew.
Keith Gaboury’s The Boy Born With a Pinhole Heart is a moving collection dealing with family history, particularly a grandfather’s heroism and decline.

Keith Gaboury earned a MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. His poems have appeared in such literary publications as Poetry Quarterly, New Millennium Writings, and the San Francisco Public Library’s Poem of the Day Series. The Pedestrian Press published Oakland, I’m Not Dead in 2020, Finishing Line Press published The Boy Born with a Pinhole Heart in 2022, Kelsay Books published The Cosmos is Alive in 2023, and Falkenberg Press published Still Human in 2025. He’s also a preschool teacher, a bibliophile, and the president of the Berkeley Branch of the California Writers Club. Keith lives in Oakland, California.
Keith gaboury
Author
TESTIMONIAL
What Skoyles is Saying
The speaker of these poems confides, reveals, laments and ultimately sees his experience as part of “a family of naked stars shining onto waves breaking anew.” Central to the saga is the speaker’s place among loved ones and in the world at large. The Boy Born With a Pinhole Heart tells the story of a family with intimacy and grace.