Explore the mysteries of love through this poetry collection covering 101 kinds of love. Take a journey through these poems as love progresses from brutal love to healing love, from self-love to world love and from rock love to spiritual love.The book is written for those who believe in love, value it strongly and are seeking to explore love’s dimensions and workings more in order to deepen their understanding. It would especially appeal to those who have done much of their own work to know love beyond the drivel and hype. These poems are deeply psychological and heavily influenced by both Buddhism and Systems Theory, highlighting loving kindness, nondualism and interconnection. This book can help those of us who need to break out of the illusions of dualism so we can travel the wicked and beautiful road to real love. The journey from illusion to healing to nonduality in the book is based on Buddhist beliefs that we have to go beyond maya and the struggles brought on by desire and aversion to find compassion, maitri, karuna and equanimity.
Love Catalogue, book 1, Love Catalogue, book 2 and Poems on the Road to Love, are three books of poems that explore love from a psychological perspective. They were written by JV Connors (aka Joanie), a licensed psychologist who combined her academic knowledge about relationships with the wisdom she learned from therapy clients, distilling their courageous struggles and triumphs into verses that explore the many ways that love shapes our lives.
Connors began writing poetry 20 years ago to help a friend in crisis, then discovered that poetry enabled her to bring together all the perspectives of her life work – psychotherapist, systems scholar, nature lover, Buddhist and friend – towards understanding love’s journey. She hopes these books encourage readers to pursue the guidance that love provides to troubles, or even see that love really is the answer.
She earned a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Missouri at Columbia and taught classes in counseling, peace studies, psychology and sociology for 20 years as an adjunct faculty at four universities. She has written numerous articles for publications such as the Journal of Group Counseling, Desert Exposure, and the Northwest Earth Institute (these can be found here). She also co edited the book, Teaching Peace through Popular Culture.
Current writing projects include completing a play for the Silver City Community Theatre (Poker Queens of Silver City) and a biography about her father (E. Bruce Connors in War, Love, Work & Life). In addition, she is nurturing a new flock of poems towards compiling Love Catalogue, book 3.
Connors lives in the foothills of the Gila National Forest near Silver City with two cats and a dog. She is a steering committee member for the Silver City branch of the Great Old Broads for Wilderness and previously volunteered for peace, human rights, trauma remediation, and animal welfare causes, along with serving as a peace witness in Central America for seven summers.
