Love’s Ways: A Meditation on Love

Love’s Ways is an aesthetically fulfilling project book, by and large, because of the accompanying mini paint vignettes that follow each section of poetry. Love’s Ways pulls at the heartstrings of readers just in time for the approaching Valentine’s Day holiday. Though for most, love can be constantly overwrought these days with self-help and non-fiction and long overdone in fiction, especially poetry, this sparse reflection to the emotive is commendable. It takes a lot of nerve to write a book about love in such a cynical moment in time, but Mark Gabriele pulls it off with simplicity and buoyancy. And to boot, the messages on the page are probing and intensified with each pastel color, above all with the very first one introducing the collected works, “Love is invisible/ but we know it is real by its effects. It creates” and Kazzrie Jaxen dabs a spring of lush green with specks of white. This creates a spirit of liveliness for the lines of verse to come. Such are the series of collages in this pocket-sized booklet that creates poetry in motion and sets Love’s Ways apart into an evocative lot of exposed and raw experience. The colors progress with each deepened sensation and it even transforms into layers of abstract figures, shapes, and spectrums to match the energy of love bound in this leaflet.

Love’s Ways is overflowing with visual stimulus and incredibly pithy, but enchanting, language, such as “Because Love is both cause and effect,/ it magnifies itself/ like ever-broader circles/ radiating in water/ from the smallest drop.” Despite the fact that more often than not, the phrasings here are capable of rendering too highly familiar and cliché thoughts of love, each and every one obvious about being too touchy-feely, readers still build up culminating responses to the climactic moments in Love’s Ways,” typically because of the undemanding poetics but lovely and universal trajectory that leaves us with a bittersweet taste in our mouth pinpointing “Where there are hurts/ it [love] seeks to heal them.”