Love - or its absence - is at the heart of everything we do, and yet it is often mishandled and misrepresented. In the words of Jose Olivarez: ‘How many bad lovers have gotten poems? How many crushes? No disrespect to romantic love - but what about our friends?’

Promises of Gold is what happens when you try to write a book of love poems for the homies amid a global pandemic that has laid bare all of the other pandemics that we have been living through our whole lives. Capitalism. The police state. Colonialism. Toxic masculinity.

Promises of Gold attempts to reckon with the reality of the American Dream and how its promises have borne out in the lives of hyphenated Americans. It charts an ongoing practice of healing, a challenge that demands the poet shows up for himself, his friends, his family, his community - his loves - every single day.

Love, we learn, is complicated by forces larger than our hearts. Promises of Gold is written to replicate the struggle of loving and learning and growing.