Jennifer Strube

When we encounter the wild, our souls wake up.

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Something deep inside us stirs.

We come alive.

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As we age, we forget this enchantment. We forget who our childhood selves knew we were--when we built forts and declared ourselves kings and queens of the land. This collection of poetry offers a return to the wild, to let the wilderness be our final frontier. There, we fall in love again. We encounter beauty unexplainable. We remember we are made of stardust and return home to ourselves.

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Enter in.

The wild is calling your name, and it will not let you go.

Somewhere between fairy tales and foreign lands, they've promised you a love poem. Originally gifted as a wedding gift for her husband, I Promised You a Love Poem was written over ten years on backs of bar napkins, passport entry cards, and coffee receipts.

Setting home as both a tangible and spiritual locale, this collection explores the romantic havens we claim as Eden, the barren corners we view as exile, and the realities that bridge the divide. "Innocence is an infectious paradise," writes Strube, the garden from which we stem and inexplicably long to return. Home: our constant search and effervescent companion. We travel far to find ourselves and sing our urgent hallelujahs.

Six months before her 30th birthday, Sam’s life as she knows it flops. Dumped by her fiancé, fired from her dream job, dropped by her graduate program, and evicted by her Upper West Side landlord, she loses everything except the one thing she desperately wants to: Her virginity. Determined to thrust herself into the fever of matrimonial bliss, Sam sets sail on a spiritual quest. She honeymoons with her Bible-toting divorcee mother in Europe, vibrates into Om at a yoga training in Guatemala, and rubs rosaries in California hotels on a crusade for holy sex. Crossing two coasts and five countries, Sam moves forward by crawling back, confronting the truth of her past, which clings as tightly as the quirks of her childhood faith and as intimately as her crown chakra. Where is true love and can true love really wait? On a journey as bewildering as it is sovereign, Sam gets much more than she bargains for, in a tale where letting go and growing up proves insatiably more orgasmic than she ever imagines.