Thank you to Sophie Diener, St. Martin's Press, St. Martin's Griffin, and NetGalley for a free advanced reader copy of "Someone Somewhere Maybe" for an honest review.

"Things do not have to last forever to have been meant to be."

There's a glorious paralleling of an early, first, deep falling in love being mined and reflected on within this volume of poems. We see the glorious structure of falling in love, being in love, and then how that love fell apart, which on its own could have filled this whole chapbook and has filled dozens of the modern wave of confessional poetry books. What makes this volume stand out is that the first half of the story is that, and the second is the much later present-day voice & paired poems reflecting on that time.

There's such an importance weaving through, about how love (and the lessons we learn falling in love, being in love, falling out of love, having out hearts broken by love) is just as important at every step of its life, and in the far rearview mirror. That all those things can still be cherished for exactly what they were, how, and why, no matter what the ending of them might have been. This book felt far less like looking back on a painful time and mourning it, as celebrating that a great love had happened, a swelling of the deepest gratitude for it having graced the poet's life.

I'm definitely looking forward to more ot Diener's work in the future.