hush now, love.

''He said he couldn't love me, and there was no poetry to it, only pain,'' Leilah Ali writes in her debut full-length collection, hush now, love. Ali explores the fervent adoration and often unmentionable toxicity that occurs from young love, and how healing--in all its forms--looks in a modern setting. It mirrors humanity in a manner incomparable to other poets because of the brutal honesty seeping from between the lines. The prose is perfect in its utter imperfection, and readers are left questioning whether we are spiders on the web Ali spins, or the trapped flies.