Love and Longing

These poems understand what the heart learns too late: that love and longing are the same word seen from different distances. Raskin writes with an urgency that refuses to separate desire from its shadow, joy from the knowledge that joy cannot last. Some poems burn with the immediacy of new love, its declarations so raw they feel whispered for the first time. Others carry the weight of absence, the specific grief of reaching for someone who is no longer there. Together, they map the full territory of the heart, from the heights where lovers speak in absolutes to the quiet places where memory lives. Raskin's voice is direct and aching, never precious, never detached. He writes about love the way it actually feels: not as a steady state but as a climate, one that contains storms and calms. These are poems that have survived because they tell the truth about what it means to want and to lose, sometimes in the same breath.