Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There by Jade Wallace

Guernica Editions’ “First Poets” series is one of my favourite sources to explore emerging voices, and Jade Wallace is no exception. Their book Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There is a wonderful series of narratives in verse. Each section portrays a story told through poems, united by the common themes of people’s relationships to geography and to each other.

The book’s exciting concept is supported by strong imagery and a skillful balance between humour and darkness throughout. Different gothic themes and affective spaces frame each section, containing poems that question the private and public, the local and the global, the human and the nonhuman alike. The role of nature is a recurring concept, and it ranges from a passive setting for characters to the subject of interrogations of larger human impacts on the environment.

“Vanishing Beach,” the penultimate section, contains many of my favourite poems in the book. The section depicts two people staying at a beach and attempting to revive their struggling love against the backdrop of the unforgiving ocean and the animals that share their coastal retreat. Poems such as the sonnet “Nature Has Limited Patience for the Human Condition” showcase Wallace’s skill in weaving together emotion, the body, nature, and poetic form to pack a punch:

Twilight is growing like a cloud on my left knee,
which I have already, several times,
dashed carelessly against the stone.
One day, my joints would not withstand the slog.

Not all the poems are this strong, however, and some less polished pieces stand out against the many gems. This is a fault that does not diminish the concept and mission of the book overall.

For lovers of haunted houses, softness, creatures, and intertexts (and haters of big cities), Love Is A Place provides sanctuary and pleasure in its pages. When a book opens with epigraphs from lesbian pulp fiction and cultural theory, it promises to be a delightful journey, and Wallace certainly delivers. I very much look forward to seeing what they do next.

Jade Wallace is the author of several solo and collaborative chapbooks, the reviews editor for CAROUSEL Magazine, and the co-founder of MA|DE, a collaborative writing entity. Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There is their first book.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Guernica Editions (April 1 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 104 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1771837748
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1771837743

Zoe Shaw

Website

Zoe Shaw is a writer, editor, and administrator based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montreal. She is managing editor at carte blanche literary magazine. Her major interests are in gender and sexuality, ecocriticism, and the elegy in British Romantic poetry, which she explored in her master’s thesis at McGill University. @zoestropes on Instagram. Her website is http://zoeshaw.com/