"I am lost sometimes but I always find myself." In the Essence of Love and Experience, Fari Syed takes readers on a therapeutic journey through poetry. With lyrical language and boundless empathy, Syed plumbs the depths of human emotion and interrogates life altering choices-missing the opportunity to see one's mother the day before she dies, choosing to trust someone else over oneself, choosing between two lovers. Writing on love and desire, grief and heartbreak, power and ethics, Islamic ideals and societal norms, parenthood, parental death, and the twisting paths of the mind, Syed moves from dark to light, innocence to experience, doubt to trust, despair to resilience, lost to found.