Sophia Iannuzzi

Love Poems for the Socially Anxious & Other Maladies Sophia Iannuzzi

Love Poems for the Socially Anxious& Other Maladies is an unsentimental, conflicted, and ultimately healing look at love from the perspective of a longing for union and the loneliness of being one of a pair. Iannuzzi unflinchingly reports and explores phone calls, absences, awkward moments, miscommunications, making up, and intimacies in clean lean language. And I appreciate her deft control over forms, from short to long, from cryptic lyric to expressive prose poems. She excels in simple, haunting short forms as well: "to be asked what love is" comprises five short lines: "two toothbrushes/ in a cup/ beside the sink/ where there used to be one/ and no cup/" In all, she gives us a whole experience and exploration of love in our time with flashes of luminous images, as in "fragments/ of our/ patchwork souls." --Judith Stanton