Dear Lover,

Dear Lover –poems of love, loss, and disappointment, shame, pride, and indifference.

Dear Lover—a poetry collection about hope and heartbreak, about love in its short, long, and temporary forms, about how love can be cloaked in abuse, how love can build us or break us, the hard and soft o......more

Dear Lover –poems of love, loss, and disappointment, shame, pride, and indifference.

Dear Lover—a poetry collection about hope and heartbreak, about love in its short, long, and temporary forms, about how love can be cloaked in abuse, how love can build us or break us, the hard and soft of it, the good, the bad, and the completely atrocious.

The collection is a poetic story of different relationships which are organized into the stages of a relationship; that initial attraction, the circling dance around each other, the honey-moon stage, the souring, the fighting, the breaking up, and the recovering. This work is deeply personal, but relatable all the same.

Autobiographical at its core, it aims for love's failures and triumphs, its disappointments and celebrations, the bad, the good, and the downright ugly. It is a poetry collection that reaches for the hearts of anyone who has ever fallen in love, thought of falling in love, fallen out of love, or is in love with the idea of love.

Written in letter format, the collection includes a few sonnets, a couple villanelles, and a pantoum among the formal verse poetry, but mostly it is an experimentation with prose poetry and free verse that hardly seems free at times due to the skill with which the poet wields words.

Dear Lover, includes Lori Jenessa Nelson's sharp eye for detail and idea organization, as well as her ability to express these ideas using the most evocative language, and effective, if not always proper, grammar. She wields the vocabularies that she has gleaned from her artistic background in a way that adds a delicious realism to even the saddest of poems.

Because love does not always come with lovers, Dear Lover, also includes a section about casual sex, because Nelson frowns severely on slut-shaming and believes in the power of sexual freedom associated with "having sex the way that men do." She accepts the positive and negative that comes with the act and includes her experiences in the collection.

Love is not always easy and that’s what this poetry attempts to communicate.

Let's talk about relationships. They are not always what they should be.(less)

Maple Summers here. Budding musician and blogger, author, pole dancer with a busy mind, a foul mouth, and quick fingers. We don't do transphobia, homophobia, biphobia, slut-shaming or racism here, because that's just bullshit. I'm a burlesquing, dancing, drumming, piano-playing, generally very creat......more

Maple Summers here. Budding musician and blogger, author, pole dancer with a busy mind, a foul mouth, and quick fingers. We don't do transphobia, homophobia, biphobia, slut-shaming or racism here, because that's just bullshit. I'm a burlesquing, dancing, drumming, piano-playing, generally very creative person with a busy mind.

I began writing prose and poetry when I was 10 along with very active journaling, which got really filthy as I got older and became a sexual person. I participated in the Wordsmith writing competition when I was in middle school, and won a writing contest with one of my short stories when I hit high school, where I also played viola in the orchestra, danced and sang in the show choir (which is really funny because I ca

Maple Summers here. Budding musician and blogger, author, pole dancer with a busy mind, a foul mouth, and quick fingers. We don't do transphobia, homophobia, biphobia, slut-shaming or racism here, because that's just bullshit. I'm a burlesquing, dancing, drumming, piano-playing, generally very creative person with a busy mind.

I began writing prose and poetry when I was 10 along with very active journaling, which got really filthy as I got older and became a sexual person. I participated in the Wordsmith writing competition when I was in middle school, and won a writing contest with one of my short stories when I hit high school, where I also played viola in the orchestra, danced and sang in the show choir (which is really funny because I can't sing worth a shit), and furthered my piano skills by taking private lessons of gospel and improvisation with this bomb ass black woman who I adored. I also still wear my Wordsmith shirt, even though I am now 27 and it's been...14 years? I don't let go of ANYTHING.

In college, I realized that I'd grown out of prose writing (aka, school sucked the fun out of it like it does for everything) and only wrote prose under "great duress" until I discovered the hybrid of prose poetry which unleashed a whole new range of creativity, and probably got me back into writing in actual sentences, which probably also got me into blogging.

Writing in both formal verse and freeform, I further explored the form of prose poetry that inspired my book, Dear Lover, which covers some of my personal anecdotes in letter formats in an effort to make my writing more relatable to persons of all ages (lol, like, 16+ because I rarely write anything that's truly child-friendly) and backgrounds.

I've previously had my poem "This is what we should've feared" published by Belleville Park Pages, an international literature magazine, in the summer of 2014. That was really cool and I was extremely proud of that accomplishment.

I'm currently working through my first novel...s, a couple poetry collections, and some music stuff, you can support me by buying copies of my poetry collections or short stories, sharing my blog posts and books, blowing up my YouTube channel, and leaving love notes in my inbox, in the comments, and on my social media to keep me motivated.

If I haven't bored you to death yet, be sure to check out my other blogs for advice/info about travel, childcare, gardening, health, and some other stuff because my brain is a busy, suffocating place and I have nothing better to do than write a whole lot of blog posts.

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You can keep up with my book and music projects by looking at my Works In Progress, which are all located on Kisses & Snails.

Did I say buy all of my books, watch my Youtube videos a million times, and share my shit? (less)