This was damn good poetry. Damn good. I'm looking forward to reading more from Jade Wallace in the future. Definitely a new favorite for me.

This short book of poetry is great for anyone looking for the beautiful use of language, and not necessarily wanting the poems to rhyme. I loved the theme of home throughout each section, and how it means different things to different people.

I will always be partial to a book that is at least, in part, dedicated to cats. I'm also a huge fan of stories where Place is a character, and this book of poetry really did feel like a love story to Place.
Small town Ontario soul searching, coastal adventures with a growingly distant lover, a guide to New York City for the cynic in all of us. Heartache and nostalgia and dry wit -- altogether a really lovely collection and wonderful debut from Jade Wallace.

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!

This was really good! It’s rare that I read reflective poetry like this, but I loved the author’s descriptive writing style and the organization of the chapters. It was difficult at points to decipher the meaning of some of the poems, but I think that was just me. My favorite poems were those in the first and last chapters.

Thank you to Netgalley and to the publisher!

2.5
Poetry is a hard thing to review since it is the inner workings of someone's mind. Their reflections on self and the world around them. The poetry that i find good is one that not only reflects from within the writer but also reflects the world around us in a way that is understandable and relatable. Something as a reader you can ponder on and say "exactly" or "I never thought of it that way" or "that was an amazing way to put that". This book for me while it was a reflection of the writer that i appreciated the other parts for me were lacking. I did not relate to some of the pieces and did not have further insight to do so. The parts I could grasp or relate did not touch me. A few I felt were a little disconjoined. I did not fully enjoy or get wrapped up in this as I wanted to but I think maybe some others might. I had to give it an average rating for my own taste.