If I Imagine Love at All
“I have not yet inhaled the hair of this man / who will take me in my too-rough sheets.”
Valentina Gnup’s poetry collection, Ruined Music, was published by Grayson Books in March 2024. In 2023 she won the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for Poetry and second place in the (NYC Yeats’ Society) Yeats Prize for poetry. In 2019, she won the Lascaux Prize in Poetry; in 2017, she won the Ekphrastic Challenge from Rattle; and in 2015, she won the Rattle Reader’s Choice Award. She’s had two chapbooks published, Sparrow Octaves and A Certain Piece of Sky. Her poems have appeared in many literary journals including December, Brooklyn Review, Nimrod, and The New Guard. She lives in Oakland, California.
“I have not yet inhaled the hair of this man / who will take me in my too-rough sheets.”