Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There: Volume 23 (First Poets)

by Jade Wallace

Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There is divided into 7 sections. The first 5 sections focalize particular geographical regions: Southern Ontario in "The Southern Ontario Gothic Tour," North York in "The Northern Edge of Everything," New York in "Cynic's Guidebook," New Brunswick in "Vanishing Beach," and Antarctica in "Signs in the Southern Hemisphere." Though each section tells a story of people moving through these places, the poems ultimately subvert the expected conventions of travel narrative, directing critical attention to the personae and roles of travellers and to the systems of power at work in each locale. This is a book deeply concerned with psychogeography, the ways that individuals and environments mutually shape one another. Psychgeography comes to the fore particularly in the final two sections of the book, "Animals in Strange Houses" and "Genius Loci." In "Animals in Strange Houses," animals, both human and not, must literally and figuratively reconstruct homes after being displaced by urbanization and ecological destruction. In the final section, "Genius Loci," poems function as both portraits and place studies and reveal the deep intimacy between examinations of persons and places.

• ISBN10: 1771837748
• ISBN13: 9781771837743
• Publish Date: 31 May 2023
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: CA
• Imprint: Guernica Editions,Canada
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 104
• Language: English

Reviews

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Thank you, NetGalley and Guernica Editions, for the chance to read and review the ARC for Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There by Jade Wallace.

 

This 104-page long book actually had quite a few poems I enjoyed. However, as a whole, I'm leaving this debut poetry collection 3.5 stars out of 5 (rounded up to 4 where that isn't an option).

 

The poems in this collection feel like a series of vignettes centered on travel, ghosts, and love. There are some beautiful moments and beautifully done stories, and I've picked out quite a few poems I like and will be returning to in the future.

 

My concern for this book is that it could have been better edited to make it more consistent. Certain poems, like Rue, end on a cheesy note with the italicized lines;

 

"No, you said. What's cruel is making people live in a graveyard."

 

There is a market for poems like that; there are a million writers who write like that (it's getting boring), and it doesn't always overlap with other poems like The Lost Rooms or Shutter, which are terrific pieces. The authors' poems on infidelity were also really intense; I could picture the stories described in those poems (Rituals of Parsing will live in my head rent-free), but between the ones at the start being slightly dull and the slightly cheesy bits, they're lost.

 

The writer has a lot of potential! Overall, the collection was cohesive because you could feel that some thought had gone into how the poems were organized. However, as they grow as a writer, I think each poem will just be better in quality and we'll see all of their style come through!