5 Poetry Collections to Gift to Your Valentine

milk and honey, by Rupi Kaur
If you don’t want to go full-on romance, this collection is perfect. It’s stripped-down and full of straightforward, honest, occasionally dark poetry about love, but also about being a woman, loss, and life in general. Kaur’s verses take all of your inner thoughts and lay them out beautifully bare. For example, from “fingers:”
the most important conversations
you’ll have are with your fingers
when they nervously graze hers
for the first time during dinner

Memories, by Lang Leav
Leav’s poetry is enchanting and lyrical, with just the right lilt to lull your lover into a peaceful, nostalgic happy place. Memories is a combination of the best poems from her previous works, Love and Misadventure and Lullabies, plus a few new poems and illustrations, all celebrating the ups and downs of life and relationships. An excerpt you’ll love from “Faith”:
I whisper your name like a prayer—with all the hope of heaven.
I trace the lines of your palm and draw a map to salvation.
I hear the knock of your heart and I answer it like my calling.

Erotic Poems, by e. e. cummings
If you’re looking from something romantic and sexy that balances playful and serious, cummings’ erotic poetry collection is it. It’s thoughtful, interesting, and funny (sometimes), and it’ll make you feel all sorts of squishy and loving. And as an added bonus, this edition has some of cummings’ own illustrations printed alongside the poems. Suggestion: queue up a few playlists of British men reading these poems aloud for extra fun.

Felicity, by Mary Oliver
It’s tough not to love Mary Oliver, who’s so consistently amazing at putting into verse the way she loves the world around her. With Felicity, Oliver moves past dogs and horses and nature and into the world of human love, but she keeps the familiar, comforting style throughout. Need to reassure your Valentine that falling in love is nurturing and constructive? Just read to them from “Not Anyone Who Says”:
Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be
  careful and smart in matters of love,”
who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,”
but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable —
only those know what I’m talking about
in this talking about love.

Dirty Pretty Things, by Michael Faudet
Like e. e. cummings, Faudet isn’t afraid to explore the erotic. This collection of poetry and short stories is sensual and loving and surprising in the best way possible, full of romantic scenes that will make you want to hold your Valentine a little closer. Making it even more interesting, the subject and inspiration for many of Faudet’s poems is Lang Leav, and vice versa, and probably nothing will make you want to go pick up his book more than this quote about her:
“She’s the exclamation mark in the happiest sentence that I could ever possibly write.”