Jennifer Clarvoe’s second book,
Counter-Amores
, wrestles with and against love. The poems in the title series talk back to Ovid’s
Amores
, and, in talking back, take charge, take delight, and take revenge. They suggest that we discover what we love by fighting, by bringing our angry, hungry, imperfect selves into the battle. Like a man who shouts for the echo back from a cliff, or the scientist who teaches her parrot to say, “I love you,” or the philosopher who wonders what it is like to be a bat, or Temple Grandin’s lucid imaginings of the last moments of cattle destined for slaughter, the speakers in these poems seek to find themselves in relation to an ever-widening circle of unknowable others. Yearning for “the sweet cool hum of fridge and fluorescent that sang ‘home,’” we’re as likely to find “fifty-seven clicks and flickering channels pitched to the galaxy.” Song itself becomes a site for gorgeous struggle, just as
bella
means both “beautiful” and “wars.”