Loveship by Ed Gold

Loveship sets sail on a wild and rollicking cruise through all sorts of love. There is the joy and the heartbreak of romantic love, of course, but Ed Gold’s explorations include imaginary love, the love for a good hand in poker, the love of orchids, and the love for meat held by passengers on the ark. Readers will soon realize that the real love affair here is the love of language, and Gold takes a deftly no-holds-barred approach to celebrating it. Bon voyage!

–Susan Finch Stevens

Gold launches us on a luminous voyage of the heart filled with immense generosity, unexpected narrative and lyrical arcs. His work is deep in humility. He explores longing and loss but also joyfulness and the bittersweet. He gives us the nautical chart for relentless endurance despite “the warnings” included with living. In short, I want to ride this loveship wherever it goes, turning each page until the end, and then go beyond.

–John Milkereit

In my history of poetry, the short love lyric is a revolutionary poem. Revolutionary in that the poet is singing about himself, and his own very personal love. Just as Ed Gold is singing in Loveship, to hell with politics, empires and great themes he wants to lie beside his beloved, in the kissing crust, where it smells like clove and oranges. And that impulse makes for wonderful poems. Loveship—get on board.

–Richard Garcia