Love Will Burst into a Thousand Shapes

By Jane Eaton Hamilton

Art, children, marriage, breaking, rejoicing.  Love is a many-branched tree and in Hamilton’s newest poetry collection, her third, it’s autumn or winter, the winds are kicking up and branches are flying everywhere—bursting into a thousand shapes.  Or maybe it’s Hamilton’s heart that explodes into many dimensions.  Tender, furious, grief-stricken, witty, urbane, elegiac, political, personal, erotic—these poems are all those things.  Hamilton can’t stop loving big no matter how chancy it is.

All these shapes lend raw material for a poem: Mothers lose their babies.  A boy loses his leg to war.  A girl hides from serial killer Richard Speck.  A virgin gets pregnant.  A partner mourns a death at Walkerton.  Women tumble into love, celebratory and foolhardy.

Frank and elemental, Love Will Burst Into a Thousand Shapes reminds us that life is worth everything we can throw at it.