Love Breaks by LYNN CIESIELSKI

Love Breaks, the most recent collection by poet Lynn Ciesielski, includes many recent poems along with works previously published in The Buffalo News, Tilting Toward The Moon: LitGarden Writers Anthology II, Wild Goose Poetry Review, BlazeVox, Helix Poetry Magazine, A Celebration of Western New York Poets, and in other publications. Marked with both tragedy and tenderness, Ciesielski’s poetry explores the journey through love found and lost, relationships broken and healed, and navigates the fragile ways we find ourselves on a path of darkness to honor yet what we have lost. In “When I Think of You,” she writes, “I could offer a wealth of constellations and a map of the midnight sky folded to fit in the door of your locket”.

–Kate Willoughby, writer and editor of Tilting Toward the Moon, 2023, Just Twelve More Poems, 2019, and Earth’s Daughter’s Literary Magazine, 2024

Love Breaks will take you on a journey through loss and grief. It is painful and honest, heartbreaking and beautiful. In telling her own story, Lynn Ciesielski will gently challenge you to not only remember the darkness of your own goodbyes, but also the light of your privilege to have had and to have loved.

–Jillian Hanesworth, EMMY winning Poet Laureate Emeritus, Buffalo, NY www.jillthepoet.com

In Love Breaks, Lynn Ciesielski performs a verbal post mortem on loss itself, laying out for us the tangible manifestations of the sensory input that arise from and carry us through the worst moments of living. Dazzling.

–Gary Earl Ross, Prof. Emeritus, University at Buffalo, Edgar Award-winning writer of plays, novels, and short stories. Author of Blackbird Rising, Beneath the Ice and Other Stories, Shadows and Mirrors: Four African-American Suspense Plays, and the Nickel City Mysteries with Buffalo PI Gideon Rimes. www.garyearlross.net