Surprisingly sweet and gentle, this love story of a crime victim and a troubled man, an ex-offender, consists of 85 brief, lyrical poems and 24 narrative fragments. The book includes paraphrases of actual court records and allusions to the medieval tradition of courtly love. Inspired by The Songs of Songs, with its surreal mixture of the erotic and the spiritual, as well as by centuries of love poems, from Sappho to Milosz, this poetry collection...