SOFT ARMOR is a meditation on love in its many enactments and forms--romantic, parental, ecological, spiritual, and communal. It is an insistence on being in love with a burning, disappearing, and increasingly elusive world, each poem its own testimony. "SOFT ARMOR is an offering of tenderness, of witness, of hope. As a 'quiet seer,' Jones urges readers not to look away from ecological crisis, late-capitalist brutality, and racist violence, but to 'praise what remains,' whether romantic love, familiar nurturance, or enduring beauty of the natural world. There's no better poet to 'unpack the wild wild of it,' leading the reader into a future that we can only build together."--Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, author of Look Alive "SOFT ARMOR is a passionate phoenix of love poems birthed out of the refuse of a Necropastoral landscape, where the poet embraces the wisdom and devastation of our natural and unnatural world to boldly indulge and relish the intimacy of self-love, romantic love, and love flowing from parent to child, body to earth and back completing a circuit that declares 'I am more here than I ever have been.' MJ's lexicon of love is an assertion of being alive at the End of the World and loving on purpose."--Nefertiti Asanti, author of fist of wind "a tunnel of true love: where the body, the spirit, the allure of intimacy & reverie meet. Michal "MJ" Jones has led us down a pathway of sweet heat, inviting us to soften our ethos into a cloud of earthy constellations begging to braid itself together. SOFT ARMOR grounds us into the heart & a wonderland of multiple heavens; cooing its readers to ponder: what is our lovemaking without the bravery to see another fully? can our shadows dance even after the heart breaks? is sweetness an elixir of life or a spell cast simply highlighting the fruit of god? how was there a me before meeting/knowing/raising you? where will the compass of our feet lead us next? this collection invites us to stay in the fre