The ways of love are long and torturous. They include the ability to start over after things have blown up as well as the fine art of remembering the good times and forgetting the bad. Sometimes we need an old, never-married aunt to bring us back to an understanding of where true love resides. Or a Catullus who keeps on redefining what the ideal love relationship is. Or someone who has loved too fast and too furiously. The convoluted paths of love never fail to beguile. Catch this poet as she runs after the fickleness of love and longing.

Patria Rivera’s first poetry collection, Puti/White, was shortlisted for the 2006 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She has also published The Bride Anthology, BE, and The Time Between, and co-authored two chapbooks: Six from the Sixth and Weathering: An Exchange of Poems. Her poetry is featured in Oxford University Press’s Perspectives in Ideology, and in Elana Wolff’s Implicate me: Short Essays on Reading Contemporary Poems, as well as in the Toronto Public Library’s Online Culture Series. She has received fellowships from the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Hawthornden Castle Writers’ Retreat in Scotland, and the Nieman Center for Journalism at Harvard University. She graduated with a journalism degree from the University of the Philippines.

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