Abstract
In her newest poetry collection, Salimah Valiani traces the meaning of love in 29 different ways. Two themes thread the poetic work: the exploration of love via loss, movement, stillness and surrender; and the attempt to understand historically the socio-ecological dismantling we are living throughout the world today. This book is about love in a large sense, of a sort/sorts needed to heal ourselves and our world ravaged today with division, fascism, ecocide, inequality, and violence. It reaches to define this larger love, avoiding the more pervasive love poems that focus on romance and individual healing, and ultimately proffering that love is the means to transformative change in the twenty-first century.