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 Maple Summers' 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 Summers 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.
About the Author: Maple Summers is a writer, dancer, musician, and artist who strives to give form to the complexities of the human spirit and its wants, desires, thoughts, sufferings, victories, and failures in the form of verse. She began writing prose and poetry at the age of 10 along with very active journaling. She participated in the Wordsmith writing competition when she was in middle school, and won a writing contest with one of her short stories when she hit high school, where she also played viola in the orchestra, danced and sang in the show choir, and furthered her piano skills by taking private lessons of gospel. In college, she realized that she had grown out of prose writing and only wrote prose under "great duress" until she discovered the hybrid of prose poetry which unleashed a whole new range of creativity. Writing in both formal verse and free verse, she further explored the form of prose poetry that inspired her manuscript, Dear Lover, which covers some of her personal anecdotes in letter formats in an effort to make her writing more relatable to persons of all ages and backgrounds. She has previously had her poem "This is what we should've feared" published by Belleville Park Pages, an international literature magazine, in the summer of 2014.