Nirala Publications, paperback
Publication Date: April 1, 2025
Publisher Marketing:
What Love Is is a luminous and fearless exploration of love in all its forms—passionate and tender, fleeting and enduring, joyous and grief-stricken. In this deeply personal and visionary collection, acclaimed American poet and editor David Daniel examines the ways love binds and breaks us, how it arrives unexpectedly and lingers, shaping the course of our lives. Spurred by a life-altering act of kindness from poet Jean Valentine, Daniel's poems look at love as if through a kaleidoscope—lyrical, raw, funny, and unflinchingly honest, and all at once. From moments of ecstatic connection to the ache of loss, he navigates love's bewildering contradictions—a force both saving and undoing us.
A work of fierce vulnerability and imaginative brilliance, ecstatic in its melancholy, fierce and funny in its heartbreak, What Love Is affirms, again and again, that love is not just something we feel—it's something we live.
