Love Her Blind & Other Poems is a restless, emotionally exposed collection that moves through romantic betrayal, childhood violence, family memory, aging, faith, mental illness, and the strange negotiations required to survive all of them. David Somerfleck’s poems often begin with an ordinary object or encounter, then push it into a more charged psychological space. A rocking chair becomes part of a child’s understanding of violence, a bicycle becomes both escape and resistance, and a grandfather becomes something nearly cosmic. The collection’s range is clear in titles such as “My Grandfather’s God,” “Bicycle Rider,” “What I Didn’t Know About Love,” “Tall Time,” and “Mum.”

Somerfleck writes in a dense, image-driven style, piling physical detail onto memory until the past feels immediate and unstable. His strongest poems let metaphor deepen the experience rather than simply decorate it. In “Bicycle Rider,” reading and riding give the speaker a way to move beyond family cruelty, even when that cruelty follows him into sleep and imagination. In “My Grandfather’s God,” ancestry, nature, grief, and belief merge into a vision of blood moving through soil, roots, trees, and stars. These poems don’t treat memory as a tidy record. Memory becomes a living environment, full of weather, animals, wounds, voices, and figures that appear larger than life.

The book’s emotional center is its ongoing attempt to understand love without simplifying it. Love appears as tenderness, obsession, protection, grief, dependency, and renewed possibility. “What I Didn’t Know About Love” begins with harsh, dangerous images, but gradually makes room for a love that can be delicate, clear, and newly understood. That movement gives the collection more than darkness. Even when the poems enter frightening or surreal territory, they keep reaching toward connection, whether through a partner, a parent, a grandparent, an animal, a remembered landscape, or the act of writing itself.

What makes the collection memorable is the sense that every poem has been wrestled out of experience rather than calmly observed from a distance. Somerfleck’s voice can be raw, funny, grotesque, affectionate, angry, and unexpectedly gentle, sometimes within the same piece. The result is a book that feels intensely personal while still opening outward toward questions many readers will recognize: what families pass down, how pain changes perception, why love survives its own damage, and how imagination gives us somewhere to go when reality closes in. Love Her Blind & Other Poems turns bruised memory into fierce, strange music that keeps sounding after the page goes quiet.

Pages: 90 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0GN54HFYQ