Love Recidivus by Lisa Barnett

 

“The narrative curve of Lisa Barnett’s excellent sonnet sequence moves from other selves observed to observation of self without crossing the line into the kind of self-absorption one encounters too frequently in other collections of love lyrics. Each of these poems—most of them flawless sonnets—contains a small, transformative surprise that will delight the reader.”

–R.S. Gwynn

 

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

“Lisa Barnett’s lucid, witty, and joyfully lewd sonnets electrify Love Recidivus. These passionate poems are full of 21st century romance, love, marriage, and divorce…. Ruefully wry, smartly accomplished, Lisa Barnett is a poet who uses her stunning craft not only to display the loves of figures from Persephone to Scheherazade but to mirror the bewildering attachments of our own.”

–Molly Peacock

 

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

“In these twenty deft and pointed poems…the settings range from teen crushes to adult cynicism and from Cezanne’s wife to Noah’s, but the central story is about the coming apart of a contemporary marriage. Wise and wry, sad and giddy, [Barnett] sees with her poet’s eye the “paradise…for wreckers” in the reefs of marriage. Love, her title suggests, is a repeat offender, as addictive as crack, not a “photo-op emotion” limited to the young and lovely.”

–Susan McLean

 

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

“Several poems in Lisa Barnett’s Love Recidivus concern the disintegration of a marriage and are, in their psychological truth, worthy of comparison with George Meredith’s Modern Love. Other poems, like “To a Mismatched Pair” and “Ariadne and the Minotaur,” honor the loveliness of the unlovely or unloved. Barnett’s work is also remarkable for the tonal variety she brings to the sonnet, the form that she adopts for most of the poems here and that she employs with considerable skill, especially in the outstanding title poem.”
–Timothy Steele

 

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]