TORN TO PIECES BY A ROSE

Symptoms of Love

A patient is bound and wheeled into a doctor's office, unable to explain what's happened to him. What follows is the case file — a lifetime of evidence, laid out in five acts.

It begins at twenty, the way it always does: a glance, a kiss, a certainty that this one is different. Torn to Pieces by a Rose traces one man's love from that first unguarded surrender through the slow, seductive pull of obsession — devotion curdling into hunger, hunger into self-erasure — until the mind itself rises up to argue him out of what the heart has already decided.

It loses. What follows is heartbreak in its full, unhurried wreckage: betrayal, grief, the long fall to rock bottom, and the harder work of finding solid ground again.

By the time Doctor Svestopol delivers his diagnosis, the reader already knows the answer — they've been living inside the symptoms for one hundred poems, stories and essays. But the book doesn't end on the reveal. It ends decades later, an old man in the rain, still susceptible to a stranger's almost-kiss, proof that whatever this condition is, it was never cured — only aged and made gentler by the years.

A collection that moves from first sight to old age and finds, somehow, that the heart never stops being twenty.

Available at Amazon.com in paperback, and on Kindle.