What a Beautiful Love to Carry

What a Beautiful Love to Carry is a braided narrative of memory and mourning, built from the writings of Amberlie Klase and curated after her passing by her sister, Jennifer Klase. The book gathers poems, fragments, and raw journal entries that trace their parallel journeys growing up queer in rural Ohio, navigating fundamentalist environments, wrestling with identity, and searching for belonging in a world that often refused to see them.Across its pages, Amberlie's voice moves between mystical longing, spiritual searching, and the ache of a life lived in tension-between hope and despair, self-discovery and self-erasure, desire and loss. Jennifer's contributions hold the weight of surviving someone you love, asking again and again: Where do I put this love now? As she writes, "It seeps out of my bones and waters our garden," a line that anchors the book's central act of carrying forward.The collection is nonlinear and atmospheric, shifting between grief, memory, queer identity, spiritual reclamation, and the quiet magic of nature. Themes of queer survival, sibling grief, identity formation, and healing through storytelling recur throughout. The writing is tender, unfiltered, and often devastating, but it is also full of resilience, humor, and flashes of transcendence.At its core, this book is a testament: to the power of writing as witness, to the bond between sisters, and to the belief that sharing one life can help save another. It is a memorial, a love letter, and a lantern held up for anyone who has ever felt alone in their becoming.