A Review by Haley Hodges
One doesn’t necessarily expect youthful, Spanish sensuality or the fragrant musk of Mediterranean climes from a middle-aged Midwesterner, so I’m delighted to report that John Poch and his eighth collection of poetry, The Future of Love, are full of precisely these sweet surprises.
Compiled slowly over several decades, Poch’s poems are saturated with Federico García Lorca’s porous and ultimately untranslatable duende – a term most closely associated with flamenco, loosely understood as a kind of heightened state of passion or ecstasy. Though The Future of Love’s themes drift dreamily through an amalgam of subjects ranging from persons to places to (and this chiefly) experiences, the speaker’s Cordovan hat is continually hung on the timeless hooks of eros, marriage, and language itself, with cities like Seville and Cadiz serving as settings as well as muses.
Feeling around for a verb and asking myself what these poems most often like to “do,” perhaps at the risk of some reduction where depth and precision are concerned (Poch is adept at both), it must be said that these verses—both individually and collectively—luxuriate. Take the sumptuous, single-stanzaed “Bedroom”:
Like a woman writing Arabic marginalia
around all four sides of an English sonnet
in red ink, kiss my throat in the dark, covering me
fast and slowly like dew lifting at first light.
Before the squash flower of our bed twists closed
trying to hold the memory of a rapt bee,
be thirsty for something in me between my voice
and tongue, perhaps a moan you can translate,
distilling it into the honey of your morning
and a little poison for those who would intrude
on our correspondence with their politics, sports,
and the dull rage of news.
…shove off, reality. We’re making sweet, sweet anti-quotidian love, here. Not that Poch’s erotically occupied poems are always abstruse; indeed, some are so brief and inclined to humor as to be a wink. “Love Poem” – comprised of two lines – is the best of these:
Sometimes my shirt makes sparks.
Watch me take it off.
A reader of old-world sensibilities, I’m always deeply relieved to encounter a modern poet who has not neglected music. Poch’s poems soothe and tantalize the ear in turns with organic, well-placed euphonic finesse. “To Sleep” opens with rich cadences:
Like a man in a white suit climbing
the lighthouse stairs, I feel that rail, cold
of a hunger dissipating, winding
and lavendering me, subtly old
Sultry, textured “Flamenco” taps the same sonic vein, with many lines propelled forward via momentum generated by internal rhyme; e.g. “If you come, bring your best edge sharpened//but hidden on your thigh. I’ll guess and watch//your tendency to strum with your thumb//held on the top string…” so too the dark, ephemeral “Flours,” with lines like “Sisters of the poor, what more can we do//while we wait but breathe, what door//can we build for her courtyard?” And “The sky watches blind as a seed and sees//what will befall us all must rise.”
Because Poch is such a skilled, established poet with a long and visible legacy of excellent work—which now undoubtedly includes The Future of Love—I feel the poems can comfortably withstand a little critique—a testament to their strength. No reader of poetry ought to be a proud fault-finder, (it’s already an accomplishment merely being an accurate one) and there are few if any faults to speak of in this collection. This being the happy case, I did now and then tire of language that felt high on itself at the cost of semantics, not that poems always need to ‘mean’ more than they say or offer up a banquet of meaning for the reader. Still—for me—the post-modern impulse to join images and phrases with very little connective tissue afflicted poems like “No Disillusion,” which opens—
Flower today, rhetorical vermilion in my throat,
and flutter my attention to the reachable branches.
And from there—“Each day you open your chemistry of looks I am//a millionaire of moles. I don’t want the violence//of a watercolor landscape in mostly silver to mimic//anything more than olive trees reaching…” It’s not that I need to know where I’m going when I hop in for the poetic ride, I just need to know I’m going somewhere. There’s nothing more refreshing than the bizarre, wacky or startling when those things proffer some kind of reward for the reader’s attention—an insight, an experience with beauty or truth, even an unexpected opportunity to say ‘me too!’ or deepened perception of reality. Pairing unlike things is the lifeblood of poetry, because it renders the new. But too little cohesion means a poem struggles to compel, no matter how compelling its individual images. Now—this is hair-splitting, a magnifying glass held over a body of work revealing one small speck.
The Future of Love—heavily landscape and (day)dreamscape driven—falls into a legacy that recalls most immediately the work of Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost and—at the level of intense, singular images—Christian Wiman. It will serve as an excellent companion to anyone interested in piercing the mysterious heart of duende, or reflecting on the personal-yet-universal headwaters of love and marriage, or long-time admirers of Lorca and Neruda, whose ghosts are strongly present. Personally, I’d pair it with a jar of imported Mediterranean olives, a heaping pile of citrus, and a glass of Rioja.
The Future of Love by John Poch was published by Slant Books in 2026.
Haley Hodges received her MFA from Seattle Pacific University in 2025. She holds additional qualifications from Hope College, Shenandoah Conservatory, and Oxford University. Her work has been featured in Cassandra Voices, Ekstasis, t’ART, Reformed Journal and elsewhere. Her debut book of poems, Eros Rex, is forthcoming from Orison Books in 2026.