Hussain, Nasser: Love Language

Coach House Books, paperback

Publication Date: September 12, 2023

Publisher Marketing: In his follow-up to SKY WRI TEI NGS, Nasser Hussain tackles the absurdity of the English language

The title of Love Language can be read at least three ways: as an imperative, as the signoff to a letter, and as a contemporary way of talking about relationship styles. None of these would be wrong.

In his followup to the acclaimed SKY WRI TEI NGS, which used only the language of airport codes, Nasser Hussain moves toward a more expansive version of experimentation; in a time of physical lockdown, his pandemic poetics refuse to be confined. And so we have poems that repeat and hypnotize as English becomes more and more absurd, that compare an affair to a relationship with Apple, that list love poems the poet loves. Through it all we see a deep affection for our language, and for the ways that language lets us talk about love.

"Think of 'time as a lantern, ' suggests Nasser Hussain, in these inimitable poems that take play seriously and allow seriousness to enter the room disguised as incantation. These are poems that long to dismiss the lyric's most recent pretty mask of polite propriety and instead take us to the lyric's ancient roots. It started way back, the poet says, 'when a cave person made a grunt, ' to speak the name of a thing. Indeed. This is the lyric's ancient pact with the world: to spin playful language into seriousness of giving things their names--what are we without this speaking, this tune? Hussain knows this and writes beautiful poems--and I, for one, am grateful." - Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic