Siham Karami’s To Love the River is a love story about life. Given the diversity of topics in the volume—hope and sorrow, travel, unexpected situations—the reader might expect exactly the opposite. However, in Karami’s vision, love and loss are interconnected, part of the same body of water. In “How Could I” she writes: “you. . . laughed / as if the glass I broke was never shattered.” Life will not deliver everything at the same time, but it does deliver everything: from Paris to Czechoslovakia, to northern Minnesota. My friend Agha Shahid Ali told me, years ago, that poets should write more ghazals, and Karami has done just that. I have long thought that one of the best descriptions of a book of poems can be “lovely,” and Karami’s book is that too. —Kim Bridgford, editor of Mezzo Cammin I always enjoy the wild imagination in Siham Karami’s poems, the unfettered passion of them. One of the pieces in this collection says, “I never quite came back” from “a beauty so intense it hurt / like nascent love”; her artful poems arise from an openness and intuition that reach for that beauty and often touch it. —Andrew Frisardi Siham Karami’s debut collection, To Love the River, is a lovely and poignant “hymn of what we make of everything / we were and are.” The poems glide seamlessly between retrospection, introspection, and the sensuous here and now. Some poems are heartbreakingly sad; others are brightly witty; all are graced with poetic skill in a pleasing variety of forms. The title poem speaks to the heart of the book: “The river / may throw us onto a rock / to go on living.” Life can be a rough river, we may almost drown, but those trials and tribulations have made very fine poetry. —Mary Meriam, author of My Girl’s Green Jacket Siham Karami’s To Love The River overflows with songs that pay attention: to worlds, to words, to the body, to the heart, to possibilities…. And what more would you ask from a lover? —Becca Menon, author of The Riddle and The Sphinx and other verse narratives