What Is Love?

What Is Love?, first published in 2013, is a collection of thirty poems about falling in love, losing it, and finding out what is left afterwards. The question in its title gets argued rather than answered: love arrives as an oasis after a walk through desert, it costs most when it goes, and one poem refuses it outright on the grounds that a heart is too valuable to hand over. The situations are specific — betrayal, unrequited love, an abusive marriage, a pregnancy hidden behind a lie.

Every poem opens with a line naming its situation, and many are not Innocent Mwatsikesimbe speaking at all but people he imagines: a woman deciding to leave, a mother whose escape is stopped at the bus stop, a man who says he is married when he is not. It is the earliest book in the library, built from plain speech and rhyme rather than ornament. What the collection settles on is nearer to self-respect than romance: that loving your own life is where any of it has to start.