The romances and other poems

A book that recaptures the heart of romance. A syntactic meditation on love.What if romance is not a genre but a way the world glows at the edges?In The romances and other poems Micah Cavaleri turns the lyric into a field of small flickering enchantments: yellow leaves and green nests warblers and grandmothers rivers and deserts all refracted through parenthetical asides and shifts of color voice and thought. These poems move like someone talking under their breath to a friend and to God and to the landscape at the same time-tender odd and quietly stunned by the fact of being here at all.Across dedications fairytales prayers and fractured narratives Cavaleri writes out the romance of attention itself: how a phrase can tilt how a word in parentheses can open a second world beside the first. The romances and other poems is a book of luminous fragments and gentle estrangements where language keeps reaching stuttering and singing toward a love it can almost-but not quite-say.