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Love Song: Port & Starboard
Paperback
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Published: May 21 2026
Pages: 108
Weight: 0.34
Height: 0.26 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
I am truly, amazingly for once, speechless. Not because I'm older than Hippocrates, or a blue heron just landed on my morning dock, and certainly not because it's 5 a.m. in the ER, fluorescent lights buzzing. No, I am because I just finished reading Ann Chinnis's Love Song: Port & Starboard and am overwhelmed by the beauty of such profound compassion, the high exalted music of a prophet soul praising the soft, brown bruise. . . of living. I don't fish or boat and am certainly not an ER doctor committed to an endless line of drenched emergencies, though now I know what all this feels like. Now I too am wrapped bashful in saving lives, and know what love feels like from the deep inside. Now I too want to grab a handful of mane and fling myself onto destiny's haunches. This is poetry unlike anyone else's, songs that praise the living and the dead. Believe me, you too will be speechless.
-Philip Schultz, author, Failure and Pulitzer Prize winner
There but for the grace, one feels, as there with grace, when reading these tactile, heart-breaking poems that embrace the very heart of the human condition. Ann Chinnis strikes a profound balance - more a braiding - of solace and solitude out on the waters of forgiveness, with no small portion of soul-wrenching ashore. One can only wish to have had Ann Chinnis as one's physician; but the recompence is to have entry into her gorgeous poems. These are poems in full sail, with a poet of extraordinary powers at the tiller. Are they lyrics disguised as narratives, or narratives disguised as lyrics? The answer, most engagingly, is yes. What a balancing act, and what joy to have this gorgeous book in one's hands!
-Jeffrey Levine, artistic director and publisher, Tupelo Press
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