Amoria: Searching for the Meaning of Affection
By Katerina Canyon | Tupelo Press 30/30 Project
What happens when love becomes something we no longer recognize? When the tenderness we once knew transforms into something monstrous, and we find ourselves searching for the meaning of affection in unfamiliar places?
My latest poem for the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, “Amoria,” explores the shifting landscape of love, vulnerability, and emotional survival.
The poem begins with Agapia, a figure whose name evokes agape, the Greek concept of unconditional love. She inhabits a world of sunflowers, honey locusts, and possibility. But that world changes with the arrival of Miseon, a mysterious figure carrying a hydra. What follows is a journey through snow, tar, mythical creatures, and landscapes of isolation.
The kraken becomes both a force of captivity and a creature seeking comfort. The oyster's shell offers protection but also confinement. Even the landscape seems uncertain whether it is capable of sustaining love.
I wanted to explore the contradictions of affection: how something that begins in warmth can become cold, how we can search for tenderness in places that have wounded us, and how difficult it can be to distinguish love from the longing to be loved.
At its heart, “Amoria” is about the struggle to recover a language for affection after that language has been altered by experience.
Amoria
The Poetry of Becoming
Writing a poem every day for the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project has become more than a creative discipline. It is an opportunity to confront the questions I might otherwise leave unanswered.
Some poems arrive as observations of the world around me. Others reach inward, into the places where memory, desire, fear, and imagination intersect.
“Amoria” belongs to that second category.
There is something unsettling about discovering that our understanding of love is not fixed. It changes as we change. Sometimes we cling to old definitions because we are afraid of what abandoning them might mean. Sometimes we discover that the affection we have been seeking cannot exist within the boundaries we have built around ourselves.
Perhaps the most difficult part of transformation is accepting that we cannot always return to the person we once were.
But we can continue searching for new definitions.
And sometimes, poetry is where that search begins.
Support My Tupelo Press 30/30 Journey
Throughout October, I am participating in the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, writing and sharing a new poem each day while helping raise funds to support independent literary publishing.
Tupelo Press champions poetry and literature that challenge, illuminate, and expand our understanding of the human experience. Your support helps sustain that important work.
If “Amoria” resonates with you, I invite you to follow my daily poems, share them with fellow readers, and consider making a contribution to Tupelo Press in support of my 30/30 journey.
Thank you for reading, for supporting independent poetry, and for joining me in this exploration of language, love, and becoming.
What happens to our understanding of love when the person we used to be no longer exists? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
Read and support my poetry: Tupelo Press 30/30 Project
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