Is it possible to capture something as ephemeral as love with mere words? Meira Cook draws on Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, and Kristeva to wrestle with the theoretical problems of representing the unrepresentable. In Writing Lovers she searches for a language adequate to articulating the discourse of passion, desire, and longing in the love poetry of Dionne Brand, Elizabeth Smart, Daphne Marlatt, Dorothy Livesay, Kristjana Gunnars, and Nicole Markotic. In writings by the French post-structuralists, rhetorical tropes such as speechlessness, fragmentation, and deflection testify to the writer's difficulty in broaching the subject of love. Similarly, Cook shows that love poetry proceeds out of a profound failure of language resulting from the opacity of discourse, its lack of neutrality, or the fugitive transparency of reference. Writing Lovers also explores race, ethnicity, age, and sexual identity within the context of the passionate excesses of amatory discourse.
