The My Heart Blues: Love and Blues Poems is Lamont Arrington's second full-length poetry collection, a book of love poems, heartbreak poems, duplexes, and blues-inflected meditations on what happens when the heart becomes both companion and adversary.
Across four movements - The Good, The Bad, The Dark, and The Ugly - Arrington writes with urgency, tenderness, humor, and raw self-scrutiny about intimacy, disability, mental health, desire, family wounds, masculinity, and the struggle to speak honestly after love has remade the self. The collection returns again and again to gardens, fire, water, blood, light, and the body, asking how a person can carry love without being consumed by it.
Formally alive and emotionally direct, these poems move between sonnets, duplexes, prose poems, blues structures, and free verse. The result is a collection for readers drawn to contemporary poetry about love's beauty and damage, family inheritance, inner conflict, and the hard work of learning to live with one's own heart.
Lamont Arrington's The My Heart Blues listens to a heart that will not stay quiet. Across The Good, The Bad, The Dark, and The Ugly, these poems follow love as it blooms, breaks, argues, burns, and tries to find its way home.
Arrington writes from the raw weather of intimacy: the hunger to be seen, the ache of separation, the inheritance of family wounds, the pressures of disability and mental health, and the difficult comedy of trying to survive one's own heart. His recurring images - gardens, fire, water, blood, light, swords, bodies, and names - give the collection the force of a private mythology.
Blues-inflected, tender, sharp, and formally restless, The My Heart Blues is a collection of contemporary love poems for anyone who has had to learn the difference between being consumed by love and being changed by it.
