All the Words Are Yours: Haiku on Love by Tyler Knott Gregson

Source: Penguin Random House
Hardcover, 144 pgs.
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All the Words Are Yours: Haiku on Love by Tyler Knott Gregson is a collection of haiku poems — though not all of them include references to nature — about love and all of its manifestations. This small collection, however, is just a taste of what love can mean, bring, and be to many of us. These verse reveal a poet who is romantic and optimistic, as these poems espouse not only how passionate love can be but also how transformative and consuming it is.

I am broken down
and shattered into pieces
You are still barefoot

Your soul knew my soul
long before we needed skin
to spend a life in.

Lay down your roots now, 
let them wrap tight around mine,
sink deep in the soil.

In each of these short haiku, readers will get a glimpse of the form and its power to punctuate a feeling or a moment, so that they can stop and listen to their own feelings and thoughts, compare their own past and present loves, and be more introspective. Gregson lays his heart out and is unafraid of those who would poke fun at his cheesy lines or his unabashed love expressed in intimate ways. It’s like peering into his life, watching how he forms attachments, reveres them, and carries them forward.

All the Words Are Yours: Haiku on Love by Tyler Knott Gregson could be a romantic gift for your spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend on an anniversary, as an every day gift, or something special for Valentine’s Day, that most commercial of holidays.  However, Gregson’s haiku also challenges the traditional use of the form, driven by nature imagery, to consider more abstract things as natural because we are aware of them — such as love or the soul.  Some of these haiku also leave you breathless.