What Is Love?

What Is Love? is a collection of thirty poems about falling in love, losing it, and finding out what is left afterwards. It is the earliest book in the Spreuke library, and the most varied: some poems are addressed to a lover, some are written from inside a heartbreak, and many are not the author speaking at all but people he imagines — a woman deciding to leave, someone drinking through the night, a mother at a bus stop with a baby and a suitcase, a man who says he is married when he is not. Each poem opens with a line naming its situation, so the reader always knows whose story they are in.

The questions in the title get argued rather than answered. Love arrives as an oasis after a long walk through desert; it is also the thing that costs most when it goes, and one poem refuses it outright on the grounds that a heart is too valuable to hand over. 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.