It’s Complicated: Love Poems

Love isn’t all roses and candlelight. It has always been a complicated thing: recent poets have accurately portrayed love’s more thorny, baffling, and intricate aspects, and if you look closely, you’ll find that classic poets sometimes did as well. As the following poems show, love is sometimes sharing a cold virus, compromising on television shows, getting lost in the jungle, or watching slugs copulate. If you’re sick of dopey rom-com endings—or just that thing your partner does—these poems are here for you.

For more poems about love’s complexities, explore our archive.