So Much to Love, So Much to Lose

“So Much to Love, So Much to Lose is a meditation on living a life of caring, understanding, questioning, and exploration of what our relationships can be if we manage to be kinder to one another—a bow to nature and its indelible wisdom. Most of all, it is a collection about the reach for oneness, the connection to visible and invisible worlds, spiritual and human alike.”


—Katerina Stoykova, author of Between a Bird Cage and a Bird House





“This poetry book, by a respected theologian, transformative teacher, justice-honoring administrator, and, above all, a compassionate human being, is filled with poetic wisdom grounded in deep self-reflection, sorrow connected to love, humility leading to solidarity, and hope invoking action for a better planet. Readers will find ways to express their complicated feelings about life and the world in her profoundly touching words.”


—Boyung Lee, professor of practical theology, Iliff School of Theology





“In this debut collection, Mary Elizabeth Moore probes love in all its ‘longing, mourning, delighting.’ It’s the love permeating the ‘wild wonder’ of rocks, honeybees, tulips, oceans, and humans, the love moving through the everyday and the transcendent. As we live love, so we must live loss, local and universal. These poems throb with the honesty of brokenness and pain. Yet from devastation emerge beauty, compassion, and liberating hope.”


—Libby Falk Jones, professor emerita of English, Berea College