When Love Rises by Michelle G Stradford is a well-written poetry collection that I found myself getting wrapped up in very quickly. I really liked that the author did not force the poems to all be long poems, but rather wrote each poem to the perfect length for both the topic and the emotion that the poem was meant to express. So many authors ruin their poems by trying to force them to be longer than they should be so I was much relieved to find that was not the case with these masterpieces. My favorite poem in the book was “Summer”; the poem was so vivid that I could really picture it in my head and it felt like there could be a whole story behind the poem. Overall, this book took me on an emotional rollercoaster as each poem truly showed me a different side of love and each one was imbued with such emotion that I felt like I could connect to each poem on a personal level.