Lonesome Love

Lonesome Love, Eric Jan Larsen's second book of poetry, is a collection of poems that explore race and equality, life lessons learned as a child and an adult, our moral compass, and the path forward. Time after time, the poems coalesce around social and personal injustice and social and personal responsibility. The development of character, then, is a theme that pervades the book because it is this quality that ultimately leads to self-respect and a concern for others.

Positively preoccupied with character, Eric Jan Larsen's Lonesome Love offers a collection of poems that touch upon the South, the Civil War, race and equality, family history, and the pandemic to explore what now seems like long forgotten virtues: integrity, dignity, empathy and compassion. Expanding on subjects expressed in earlier poems, the author has composed verse that speaks to contemporary and traditional issues such as the environment, political division, American values, and the virtues found in our struggles and triumphs living with ourselves and others. In the end, the poems subtly suggest that character, no matter how far away, eventually comes to everyone and that we must learn to adjust to misfortune as well as the joy in life.

Eric Jan Larsen, born in Drexel Hill just outside of Philadelphia, PA, writes autobiographical poems that explore his life experiences with politics, family, faith, tradition and love. As a folklorist and career educator, he is drawn to the culture of American history, particularly in terms of the core values that implore us to care about each other and not just ourselves. As a self-described confessional poet intent on melding life with literature, he quietly reminds us to reexamine the value inherent in dignity, integrity, compassion and love in order to reestablish these virtues as a way to live our lives.