by Charis Ed
Oncology RN and poet. By day, she administers chemotherapy to patients facing the hardest chapters of their lives. By night, she writes about love. The combination gives her poetry a weight and clarity that only comes from someone who has watched what people carry, what they give away, and what remains. All the love you have ever felt is still inside you. This book is about learning to recognize it. "All The Love You Carry" is a 306-page collection of poetry and prose structured in three movements, each devoted to a different face of love. The first honors love when it arrives — the wonder of it, the way it changes you, the fullness of being known by another person. The second moves through the pain of love lost — the grief of an ending, the slow work of growing around what remains, the discovery that loss does not diminish what was real. The third turns inward — toward self-love not as a destination you arrive at after healing, but as the foundation that was always already there, waiting to be remembered. Charis Ed's central argument, woven through all three parts, is that love is not something you search for outside yourself and either find or lose. It is something you carry — in every relationship that shaped you, in every loss that changed you, in the accumulated weight of everyone you have ever loved or been loved by. The work is not to fill yourself with more love. It is to recognize the love you are already full of. At 306 pages, the book is substantial enough to read across weeks and specific enough that any single page can meet you where you are. Readers describe particular lines landing with surprising force, and recommend returning to it in different moods rather than reading straight through — there is an entry for whatever you happen to be carrying the day you open it. Perfect for readers who: -Are moving through a romantic loss and need language for what they're feeling that doesn't rush them toward being over it -Are working on self-love and want poetry that approaches it spiritually rather than as a checklist -Are drawn to the idea of love as a cosmic or universal force — something larger than any single relationship -Want a poetry collection they can return to across years, not just read once
