Publication Date: October 15, 2025
Paperback, 74 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-22-2
I’ve Never Loved Somebody and Made Them Worse is a stunning debut, a fragmented and intimate record of relationships that blur the lines between romantic, platonic, physical, and intellectual connection. From grad seminar hallways, grocery store parking lots, borrowed bedrooms, to city sidewalks, Mia Nelson crafts a collection defined by vivid texture and tonal complexity. This is not a book about falling in or out of love. It is a study in emotional architecture, where want is a blueprint and memory the scaffolding. Nelson doesn’t seek resolution. She offers immersion. Conversations coexist with theory, flirtation breaks into philosophy, and tenderness turns on itself without warning: “I believe that the moon is the size of my thumb but also something else entirely.” Rich in voice and formal experimentation, I’ve Never Loved Somebody and Made Them Worse is a deeply felt, sharply rendered exploration of connection and its aftermath.
Praise for Mia Nelson & I’ve Never Loved Somebody and Made Them Worse
An intimate and sensuous collection exploring the many permutations of love. Mia Nelson writes with an exquisitely aching pen. I am in awe of her talent.
—Daisy Alpert Florin, author of My Last Innocent Year
Urgent and surprising, the gorgeous poems in Mia Nelson’s debut capture how early loves shape our pleasures and our shames. These poems hold youth’s seasons and bright details, and lead you across the borders of childhood with a margarita in hand. Nelson is a student of tenderness and heartbreak, and all their lessons, all their entanglements with myth, all their vulnerabilities dressed up philosophy’s robes. Each poem is another day in love with July, a book, an orange, another beloved ‘you’. This book woke my heart up.
—Traci Brimhall, author of Love Prodigal
Mia Nelson’s poems are raw and filled with summer fruit—juice drips down so much skin, between fingers and kisses and kneecaps. This collection plays with language; the characters and speakers of these poems flirt and argue, tracing the creative potential of mistranslation.
—Frances Cannon, author of Fling Diction
About the Author
Mia Nelson is a poet from Colorado. She has been supported by Dartmouth College, Fulbright Spain, the University of Vermont, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and the University of Washington, where she is a PhD student in English Literature. Her writing can be found in The American Poetry Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, and was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition in 2024. She writes about love.
Publication Date: October 15, 2025
Paperback, 74 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-22-2
I’ve Never Loved Somebody and Made Them Worse is a stunning debut, a fragmented and intimate record of relationships that blur the lines between romantic, platonic, physical, and intellectual connection. From grad seminar hallways, grocery store parking lots, borrowed bedrooms, to city sidewalks, Mia Nelson crafts a collection defined by vivid texture and tonal complexity. This is not a book about falling in or out of love. It is a study in emotional architecture, where want is a blueprint and memory the scaffolding. Nelson doesn’t seek resolution. She offers immersion. Conversations coexist with theory, flirtation breaks into philosophy, and tenderness turns on itself without warning: “I believe that the moon is the size of my thumb but also something else entirely.” Rich in voice and formal experimentation, I’ve Never Loved Somebody and Made Them Worse is a deeply felt, sharply rendered exploration of connection and its aftermath.
Praise for Mia Nelson & I’ve Never Loved Somebody and Made Them Worse
An intimate and sensuous collection exploring the many permutations of love. Mia Nelson writes with an exquisitely aching pen. I am in awe of her talent.
—Daisy Alpert Florin, author of My Last Innocent Year
Urgent and surprising, the gorgeous poems in Mia Nelson’s debut capture how early loves shape our pleasures and our shames. These poems hold youth’s seasons and bright details, and lead you across the borders of childhood with a margarita in hand. Nelson is a student of tenderness and heartbreak, and all their lessons, all their entanglements with myth, all their vulnerabilities dressed up philosophy’s robes. Each poem is another day in love with July, a book, an orange, another beloved ‘you’. This book woke my heart up.
—Traci Brimhall, author of Love Prodigal
Mia Nelson’s poems are raw and filled with summer fruit—juice drips down so much skin, between fingers and kisses and kneecaps. This collection plays with language; the characters and speakers of these poems flirt and argue, tracing the creative potential of mistranslation.
—Frances Cannon, author of Fling Diction
About the Author
Mia Nelson is a poet from Colorado. She has been supported by Dartmouth College, Fulbright Spain, the University of Vermont, Lighthouse Writers Workshop, and the University of Washington, where she is a PhD student in English Literature. Her writing can be found in The American Poetry Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, and was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition in 2024. She writes about love.
