Sundress Reads: Review of love letters from a burning planet

When I first read M. J. Gomez’s poetry collection love letters from a burning planet (Variant Lit, 2023), I was in a mostly empty coffee shop, drinking an iced vanilla latte, eating a croissant, and thinking about someone I was in love with who didn’t love me back. I was reading poems brimming with yearning and longing, with lines like “our devotion was always meant to outlive us” (Gomez 13). I was trying to suppress my own desire while reading a collection filled with unapologetic desire. This collection is also timely. The latter half of the collection’s title is apt given the state of the world: the wildfires in California and how they’re connected to climate change and the bombings in Palestine, the new President of America who doesn’t believe in climate change or Palestinian liberation.

One of my favorite poems from the collection, “They Asked, Do You Love Her to Death?” brims with adoration and devotion for the “you” of the poem. The poem is filled with rich imagery that, as a reader, makes me want to fall in love again. Gomez borrows a line from one of Mahmoud Darwish’s poems for the title of the poem and the first stanza. One of the lines that resonated with me the most from this poem is from the tenth stanza: “our devotion was always meant to outlive us” (Gomez 13). Gomez touches on the importance of poetry, and creating art in general. Even though we will all die someday, as is our fate as humans, the devotion that exists between the speaker and the “you” will be immortalized through Gomez’s poetry. How beautiful and bittersweet. This line makes me think about how some things, like devotion, are too powerful to be mortal. There are some feelings too significant to die with us, they have no choice, like Gomez said, but to outlive us. How love and devotion are potent and all-consuming. Gomez encompasses this all-consuming nature perfectly in this poem with lines like “to hold your name to the light, red light, / until it sings” (Gomez 14). Names hold such intimacy; we give people we love nicknames to convey a closeness between us and that other person. A name can be a gift, especially when you love someone. There is so much adoration in this poem. The line “There’s always room for more love” (Gomez 14) makes me smile. Reading Gomez’s gut punching lines gives me hope and makes me optimistic. So much poetry out there also focuses on the negative aspects of life: grief, sadness, loneliness. Reading this poem, along with the rest of love letters from a burning planet, is refreshing. It reminds me that poetry can be about good things, too. Love. Joy. Laughter. Devotion. Admiration.

There is a tie between many of Gomez’s poems that I’ve noticed: desire and how a person is bound to it and how yearning has a life of its own. This theme was especially prominent in the poem “Angel”:

“I knew that boy was an angel

because his rage was sung,

not spoken.

His hands

that destroyed nothing

but themselves.

His skin already soaked through

with everything but light.

Because he looked into the fire

and saw only the light’s consequence.” (Gomez 21)

Although these lines, and the rest of the poem, focus on “that boy,” I gain more insight into the speaker than I do into the “he” of the poem. This poem is an exemplary look into how infatuation takes a hold of someone. When you are so enthralled, so compelled by someone, that all you can pay attention to is them. Their hands. Their skin. Their rage. Through Gomez’s electric imagery and vivid detail, I am immersed into the mindset of the speaker and how their pining seeps into everything they do. Everything they think about. When you’re in a state of wanting, you can’t go about your day as normal. Your life orbits around your wanting.

I adore the closing poem “Aubade” for its unapologetic honesty. The poem opens with the stunning lines, “This is how we want it to end: a meteor headed straight for us. A period / larger than all the love poems left in me” (Gomez 29). What does it mean to want something to end a certain way? What does it mean to accept that there is an ending in sight? I am someone who refuses to accept when an ending is in sight. As a senior in college who is months away from graduating, I can’t help but think about endings lately. With endings, comes uncertainty. I admire that the narrator of Gomez’s poem is able to accept that there is, in fact, an ending in sight. And that they have a way in which they hope things end. The line “That the world burns even without our breathing” (Gomez 29) feels very relevant given the cultural and political state of the world. It reminds me of a tweet I saw that read “throughout the darkest times in history people were still falling in love and hanging out with their friends.” It reminds me of how joy and love are acts of resistance. Though they should not be our only forms of resistance, they are still important ones. Even as the world burns, let us continue to fall in love, laugh with friends, find joy in the little things around us.

love letters from a burning planet is available from Variant Lit

Annalisa Hansford (they/them) is the author of Romanticization of Grief and Ghosts (Bottlecap Press 2025). Their poetry has received honors from Academy of American Poets and 1455 Literary Arts. They studied poetry with Gabrielle Calvocoressi at the 2024 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. They intern at the Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge where one of their favorite poets, Frank O’Hara, used to frequent.