154 x 229mm, 138 pages, Black & white printing, Perfect bound, Softcover, 2026

Some people leave your life and remain in your senses.

A change in the weather. A familiar scent. A silence that suddenly feels occupied. There are feelings we carry long before we find the language to understand them.

2026 Readers’ Favorite International Book Award Finalist — Poetry: Love/Romance
2026 BREW Readers’ Choice Award Winner

The Gospel of Poetic Frolic: Darkness & Romance enters that unspoken territory. In this illustrated collection of poetry and lyrical prose, Sergio Melicio de Bel explores the private ache of longing alongside a larger, unsettling question: how do we remain ourselves when so much of the world wants to possess us?

Across two connected movements, the collection travels from confrontation towards connection. It opens in the shadows. A gift shop becomes a nightmare of surveillance. Technology takes on a sinister hunger. Poems of anger and resistance confront the machinery of political power, while recurring daemons give shape to buried fears and the pressures of a digital age. Body, ghost and soul offer a threefold vision of the self. Grief, memory and alienation press against the will to question, to resist, to claim a life as one’s own.

As the book turns towards romance, that struggle becomes intimate. Desire brings its own surrender, its own uncertainty. Lovers speak across the distance between them. Devotion meets the fear of exposure; warmth carries the possibility of hurt. From Tokyo’s neon streets to the landscapes of Iriomote Island, love takes shape through breath, touch, longing and the difficult beauty of allowing another person close.

Throughout these pages, nature carries the emotions that conversation cannot contain. The seasons speak. Weather becomes a way of feeling. Gentleness can sharpen into anguish within a line, and the past can seem startlingly present. The poems linger where affection and frustration coexist, where an absence has weight, where the body remembers what the mind is still trying to name.

De Bel’s language moves between Elizabethan echoes, Anglo-Saxon influences, contemporary lyricism and Japanese poetic forms. Narrative poems unfold like small dreamscapes; dramatic exchanges allow voices to answer one another; brief reflections distil a thought into a few resonant lines. Accompanying illustrations extend the atmosphere of the writing, inviting the eye to linger alongside the imagination.

This variety gives the collection its range: the force of an accusation, the closeness of a confession, the tension between two voices reaching towards each other. Its philosophical questions stay close to lived feeling. What do we surrender willingly? What has been taken from us? And what remains possible when we are still capable of tenderness?

For readers drawn to sensual love poetry, unsettling imagery and the questions beneath ordinary life, The Gospel of Poetic Frolic offers a place to read attentively and return often. Read aloud and follow the changing rhythms, or pause with a single poem and let its images settle. There is room here for anger, wonder, desire and the feelings that arrive without a name.

Open the book. Begin with what you recognise. Stay with what you cannot quite explain.

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