Kathleen Elizabeth Sumpton
LOVE, LIFE, LOSS, AND LONGING is a poetry anthology separating poems about the philosophies of the world, or main aspects of reality, into four categories. Each of these categories serves in the text as a chapter, herein called books.The first section, LOVE, talks about the good.The second section, LIFE, discusses what is.The third section, LOSS, deals with the bad.The fourth section, LONGING, touches on what isn’t.Together, all four make up what our emotions tap into when we experience things: the good, the bad, what is, and what isn’t.The order of the poems starts with the two most positive renditions of philosophy, namely the good and what is.The second half of the text leads us into more difficult hurdles, such as the bad things and what doesn’t really exist. The poems are not written in sequential order by date, nor alphabetical order, and are assembled entirely at random. This randomization reflects the way in which each of the four aspects come at us in the world. We never know when we will befeeling good or bad, or feeling a fulfillment vs. an absence.It is instinctive which of these categories a poem will falls into, and where they should be placed in sequence.This anthology uses words that all start with the letter L because of its special powers in terms of energy when it comes to language.At the end of the book, the reader should be able to relate to many of the poems and be able to have a more positive outlook on life overall, knowing that even though sometimes things are bad, they can also be really, really good. And if we didn’t have the absence of things, we wouldn’t appreciate them when they are there.