"My Heart" by Kim Addonizio
That Mississippi chicken shack...

"Negotiations" by Rae Armantrout
The best part…

"In Our Late Empire, Love" by Malachi Black
drops from upper air...

"In the dark we crush" by Julia Cohen
Crab apples for the sound of it...

"Heart to Heart" by Rita Dove
It’s neither red …

"Love in the Morning" by Annie Finch
Morning's a new bird...

"All I Ever Wanted" by Katie Ford
When I thought it was right to name my desires …

"The Wall Hanging I Never Noticed" by Dorothea Lasky
I never noticed before how the red flowers...

"Someone" by Joseph O. Legaspi
Somewhere someone rises …

"Electrons" by Ruth Madievsky
The eye chews the apple …

"Chess" by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Exactly four different men have tried…

"How to Love" by January Gill O'Neil
After stepping into the world again...

"Divine Overdose" by Matthew Rohrer
We are even more modern …

"Galaxy Love" by Gerald Stern
There’s too little time left to measure …

"Love Poem" by Susan Wheeler
My mother wouldn’t stand up …

"Things Said To Be Ineffable" by Mark Yakich
A book decorates …

"Poem to First Love" by Matthew Yeager
To have been told “I love you” …

"Blue Vase" by Cynthia Zarin
Because you like to sleep at dawn with curtains drawn…

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Poetic Pairings
Learn how to pair the perfect poem with sweets, drinks, and flora for your partner on Valentine's Day.
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Eros and the Lyric Imagination
by Marilyn Hacker
Eros is often the fuel of the lyric imagination, which chooses to use words, sentences, musical structures of language to re/member the beloved, to enter that inexhaustible source of—not uniquely “carnal”—knowledge which is another person’s body and mind.
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All My Poems Are Love Poems: When Two Poets Fall in Love
Love poetry is about as old as love itself, from Homer’s vision of Penelope’s steadfastness, to the biblical Song of Solomon, to Shakespeare’s sonnets for his “Dark Lady” (or, some speculate, Dark Lord), to Keats’s love songs for his own depression. Most poets, at one time or another, write their way into the hearts of their chosen partners, but sometimes something slightly more unusual happens: two poets fall in love with each other.
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Dear Dainty Delicious Darlings
To poets such as Lewis Carroll, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Charles Olson, Alexander Pope, Gertrude Stein, Walt Whitman, and W. B. Yeats, love letters were the means by which they could send “A hundred thousand kisses, darling!” (Joyce) or just “a hundred and eighty-two” (Carroll), whether they had been “prepared by drinking” (Pope) or written “wildly...not stopping to think” (Dunbar). Read letters to and from these poets and more.
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