When a Man Loves a Woman

The poems in When a Man Loves a Woman are about paying attention to love-to its birds, its flowers, its animals, and the body parts we don't talk about, like the "bones beneath my neck" and the "back of your heel." Love is "a dance, a dance, a dance," with endings and longings and new beginnings that move us from desire to delight. Love chills us, feeds us, and it can also give birth to hope. In these love poems, Malone is "Adorning everything." Take notes.

-Megan Willome, author of The Joy of Poetry and Love & other Mysteries

Relationship status: It's complicated. In When a Man Loves a Woman, Dave Malone considers every part of a woman. Every. Part. Book Rating: Mature, occasionally NSFW. He also considers every part of a relationship by dismantling and reassembling many moments, from the intense to the mundane. He warns us from the title poem. But by the end, he portrays the whole as more than the sum. Overall, he demonstrates a sense of reverence and respect toward love-however indefinable-and of worthiness and sacredness in engaging, despite the inevitable flaws and falls. Love, indeed, changes everything.

-Julie Ann Baker Brin, author of The Sigh and Flutter

Dave Malone's When a Man Loves a Woman charts an intimate journey from the raw aftermath of divorce, through fresh chapters of new relationships, to the deep, healing nature of love. With vivid imagery pulled from everyday moments of both ordinary life and surrounding nature, Malone masterfully crafts poems that map the complex landscape of the heart. In "Saint Christopher," the poet wonders if "that holy world-travelling giant / can carry me across a river and open my heart again." These are sensual and vulnerable poems. From losing a garlic press in a divorce to the wisdom of planting a birch tree near a home's foundation to seeing the cosmos "inside my lover's heart," Malone offers a deeply personal exploration of the multifaceted nature of love.

- Barry Harris, Editor, Tipton Poetry Journal

Dave Malone's new collection presents a "portrait of [the] full life" of an eternal romantic. As poet, storyteller, and filmmaker, he knows that movies about romantic relationships are nothing close to actual experience. What he has done instead is craft a taut and poignant three-act drama that draws abundantly from the real thing, beginning with poetic scenes from the breakup of a marriage in the opening act, through a litany of subsequent relationships in the second, and ending-perhaps surprisingly-not in despair about love but in hope. The final two poems, both written in present rather than past tense, leave readers with an image of "A fire that won't go out" and the assertion that on balance "this full life" has been more "more laughter than chorus / more delight / than anything else."

-Michael Blanchard, author of The Things of This World