The Future of Love
76 pages
March 3, 2026
John Poch’s eighth collection, The Future of Love, is comprised of poems written over the past twenty years, rooted in and inspired by the landscape of Spain, Federico García Lorca’s surrealism, and Pablo Neruda’s eros.
| Hardcover | ISBN 9781639822126 | $35.00 |
| Paperback | ISBN 9781639822119 | $19.00 |
| eBook | ISBN 9781639822133 | $12.99 |
on Goodreads
John Poch’s eighth collection, The Future of Love, is comprised of poems written over the past twenty years, rooted in and inspired by the landscape of Spain, Federico García Lorca’s surrealism, and Pablo Neruda’s eros. Also present is the influence of the flamenco—the song, the dance, and what Lorca called the duende, a term he used to signify an intense experience of passion, sadness, and ecstasy.
The third-largest cathedral in the world and the bullfight arena loom large in these pages, both strange architectures where beauty can only be achieved through suffering and blood sacrifice. The beloved here is a complicated figure: she is muse, lover, mother, housewife, model, queen, dancer, baker, sculptural object, goddess, landscape, and sea. She requires our full attention.
These poems honoring a long marriage are not sentimental or nostalgic, but passionate and wild about the beautiful tensions one finds when facing distance, absence, longing, and the struggle of faith. It is a purgatorial journey that, while fraught with gravity, curves toward paradise and rest. The influence of Plath, Lowell, and Merwin are apparent, yet the playful rhythms and sonic qualities of phrasings harken back a little farther to the intensity of Hart Crane and Gerard Manley Hopkins. This poetry takes back from the world what the world would take away.
What Others Are Saying
Ardor emanates from every page of John Poch’s The Future of Love. With the force of a zephyr perfumed with the olive, orange, and almond groves of his beloved Spain, Poch explores love—of place, of the beloved, of language, of love itself—in all its guises: devotional, erotic, playful, impoverished, penitential, hungry, emboldened. “Your voice is a poem on fire in a wire birdcage,” Poch writes of his B/beloved. “[T]he memory of your voice fills my hair with metal filings / and each church I pass is a magnet that loves arches.” Heir to the passionate poetries of Sappho, the Biblical Song of Songs, Mirabai, Rumi, Neruda, Hopkins, and Lorca, Poch has, with this latest book, matured fully into what he has always been, a poet of adoration.
Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems and Paradise Close: A Novel
Like one of the ancient Spanish cities John Poch writes about, these poems are lush, decadent, haunted and haunting, full of color and detours and unexpected vistas and almost unbearable beauty. Poch’s metaphorical gift is on robust display: “Your hair is the color of the buff rust swallows’ bellies / banking above the river after four days of rain,” he writes. These are love poems that center the beloved yet somehow transcend mere mortal boundaries. What a lucky reader whose future holds The Future of Love.
Beth Ann Fennelly, author of The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs
The future of the love poem is in good hands with The Future of Love, which seeks, according to Poch, to rescue the tradition of love poetry from the banal and reclaim it for literary poetics in the tradition of Dante, Neruda, Lorca, and Hart Crane.
Brian Pals, North American Review
Related Books
