Love Among the Yearlings represents over thirty years of Vic Ramirez's poems composed in the US, Great Britain and Scotland, Algeria, Nigeria, Japan, and Spain. The gist of the collection is straightforward: love's many seasons and faces. Our language has but this one word to express a range of emotions that shift, lack wholeness, ring as eternally as the breathing of the cosmos, are ineffable yet can be suggested in one breath, or a leaf. Through this work's many voices, love reveals itself to be a struggle, for love inhabits the same terrain as all human passion, especially fear, rage, ecstasy, compassion, pity, and at-one-ness with another or the world. The book's motif tracks our quest, as Robert Graves would put it, for that miracle of "absolute love continuing between a man and a woman," for personal identity, and ultimately, for connection to others. Love Among the Yearlings' chapters, "worrying the light," "the one I treated worst, I loved best," and "in hamburger storms," bring us to familiar and unfamiliar lands where "love was a yearling once, in the sun at the start of the day ." And where for yearlings, at least, this oldest aspect of what it is to be human is always burgeoning, always becoming dust, always becoming fire.
About the Author: Born and raised on Long Island, New York, Vic Ramirez received her Ph D in English literature from Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York, and a postgraduate certificate in Medieval literature from St. Andrews, Scotland. Upon arriving in St. Andrews, the author began writing poems and recorded these into notebooks. Following her time in Scotland, Ramirez taught English as a Second Language at a petroleum institute in Annaba, Algeria, and English literature for the University of Nigeria at Calabar. During the first Gulf War Ramirez taught at the Science University of Tokyo in Hokkaido, Japan. The bulk of the poetry in Love Among the Yearlings derives from decades of journal entries. Ramirez has published poems, two of which are included in this collection, in Free Parking by The Spirit That Moves Us Press, and World Letter. In addition to writing poetry, Ramirez writes short stories, and is working on her first novel. A guitarist and singer, the author performs her songs in and around Ogden, Utah, where she lives.