Songs made for a soul of lightFollow

by Ryan Ward

This is a book about loving someone patiently, completely, and for a very long time before anything is certain. Ryan Ward writes about the ordinary and extraordinary weight of devotion — a phone call made every week across state lines, a moment on a dark trail that changes everything, years of choosing the same answer even when it would have been easier not to. He writes about faith carried through struggle, about a friendship that has lasted twenty-one years, about grief and addiction and the slow work of forgiving yourself. And then, without warning, he writes about geese. About buffering wheels and lost socks and the particular indignity of turning forty. The result is a collection that moves between the sacred and the ridiculous the way real life does — poems that ache, poems that pray, poems that make you laugh out loud on the same page you were crying. For anyone who has loved someone longer than made sense to, or who believes the small, unglamorous act of showing up might be the truest kind of devotion there is.