What Love Is is a luminous and fearless exploration of love in all its forms—passionate and tender, fleeting and enduring, joyous and grief-stricken. In this deeply personal and visionary collection, acclaimed American poet and editor David Daniel examines the ways love binds and breaks us, how it arrives unexpectedly and lingers, shaping the course of our lives. Spurred by a life-altering act of kindness from poet Jean Valentine, Daniel's poems look at love as if through a kaleidoscope—lyrical, raw, funny, and unflinchingly honest, and all at once. From moments of ecstatic connection to the ache of loss, he navigates love's bewildering contradictions—a force both saving and undoing us.

A work of fierce vulnerability and imaginative brilliance, ecstatic in its melancholy, fierce and funny in its heartbreak, What Love Is affirms, again and again, that love is not just something we feel—it's something we live.

David Daniel was born in Danville, Kentucky, and was raised in Ruston, Louisiana, Asheville, North Carolina, and Murfreesboro, Tennessee. His first book, Seven-Star Bird (Graywolf Press), won the Larry Levis Reading Prize for the best first or second poetry book of the year, and his last book, Ornaments (Pitt Poetry Series), inspired poet Tom Sleigh to write, "No one in any generation is writing poems like these: smart, visceral, and immensely pleasurable to read." Daniel was the poetry editor of Ploughshares for more than a decade while teaching at Emerson College. He was also Core Faculty at the Bennington Writing Seminars MFA program. He now directs the undergraduate creative writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University where he is also the creator of FDU's WAMFest: The Words and Music Festival. WAMFest has been celebrated for its unique arts programming by the National Endowment for the Arts, and has featured collaborative performances by Bruce Springsteen, Robert Pinsky, Chuck D, Rosanne Cash, Salman Rushdie, Talib Kweli, C.D. Wright, Jonathan Demme, and dozens of the most important artists and writers of our time. He lives with his wife and youngest son, among a bunch of cats and old guitars, in Belmont, Massachusetts.

"A raunchy, lyrical, romantic, passionate, vulnerable, mortal work…" — Rosanna Warren, Writer

"In these tumbling-forward tercets David Daniel's poems are always falling forward like three-legged tables, like unstable humans who stumble over the tripstones of love and fall forward, who fall into the honeysuckle of desire, who suckle the birdfeeder like chicadees, whose hunger as the cat pancaked against the window. In these narratives of love, the world is a skittery heart and a sexual groove. Their arms are open to you. Run into them." — Tony Barnstone, Poet. Professor and Editor

"What Love Is is steeped in the rhythms of contemporary American life—infused with meditations on race, gender, music, and literary movements—while evoking the visionary intensity of William Blake and the meditative lyricism of Celtic monks." — Yuyutsu Sharma, Poet and Editor

"What Love Is loves love. It tenders love. It is love. You will love it." — H.L. Hix, Writer, Professor

"The hardest thing for a natural—and Daniel's ability is about as natural as it gets—is to become a perfectionist. Perfecting an acquired skill is so much easier. With these poems in Ornaments, Daniel has perfected his natural gifts. He seamlessly enters any century and any sound and any love without its feeling overblown. Daniel doesn't suspend our disbelief, he engages and embraces it. The long time Blake scholar doesn't just stand with Whitman, he does so comfortably, and we feel comfortable too. He gives our disbelief the great big hug of an old friend meeting up with us again. This book is his blessing to the world." — Barrett Warner, Pratik Magazine

"David Daniel has long known what wreckage and wounds break the soul to a blossoming wonder, both on the page and in the ear. Remarkable for how he remasters his and our suffering into sacred song, I bear witness in saying: Ornaments is a sweet American solo act that inspires a new telling that 'we can love by.'" — Major Jackson, Poet, Professor

"At his best, as in the wonderful title poem, David Daniel is River-Throated, an authentic heir of Hart Crane. Mr. Daniel's visionary development of the flooding of Friendship, Texas—with its now lost legacy of Moravian spiritual culture—is a persuasive synecdoche for American losses in our ongoing engulfment." — Harold Bloom, Critic Professor