Poetry - Feathered Quill

Always Something Heartfelt: Life, Love, and Heartbreak

By: Ashton Harper
Publication Date: January 25, 2024
ISBN: 979-8-218-20415-0
Reviewed by: Rebecca Jane Johnson
Review Date: December 28, 2025

The poetry in Always Something Heartfelt: Life, Love, and Heartbreak by Ashton Harper offers genuine human sentiment. These lyrics create an intimate and authentic connection between poet and reader. The poems express the emotional, spiritual, and psychological struggles of a man who has loved and lost.

This collection features an honest voice that is sincere and wise. The topics covered include: Alone-ness, relating with God, dating, politics, love that is both reciprocated and unrequited.

The lines and stanzas in this collection favor a straightforward conversational tone without ambiguity:

“I’m alone, but my world hasn’t stopped turning” (10) conveys sadness but remains hopeful, as do many of the poems in this collection.

There is always a useful lesson, always something to embrace on the level of emotion, and every emotion is welcome here to explore and to experience. “Most of us have a hard time saying goodbye, letting go and/or accepting change in general,” (49) and these and many other relatable insights help to welcome the reader into the poet’s interiority and sensitivity. These poems create a sense of empathy.

In addition to empathy, the poems inspire a spirit of inquiry into what kinds of actions we are taking to make the world a better place, “Do you check on the kids in your family? Have you ever visited a neighborhood school? Participated in a career day?” These questions invite the reader into a process of self-inquiry that helps us to stay accountable and true to the heart. This process of inquiry spans a range of topics from the political and social to the intimate: “How exactly do you measure the quality of a sexual experience?” (20) These poems feel like sitting with a wise guy who isn’t afraid to speak up and tell it like it is.

Quill says: Always Something Heartfelt: Life, Love, and Heartbreak presents sincere emotion and honest inquiry that invites the reader into contemplation of intimacy with others, self, and even with God, making for a satisfying and memorable reading experience.

Always Something Heartfelt: Life, Love, and Heartbreak