Name: Love Minus Love
ISBN: 9781780375083

Wayne Holloway-Smith

Wayne Holloway-Smith's second collection Love Minus Love is an internal universe, fragmented and glued back together with uncanny logic. The seemingly fixed boundaries of masculinity, family, trauma and mental health are blurred towards a new type of vinegary identity, in a pitch of emotional intensity that punches you right in the gut.

Love Minus Love

Aleena Korell

Wayne Holloway-Smith is one of few poets I've come across (so far) that I will read everything he writes. The other is Richard Siken, and the fact that there is a reference to my favorite Siken poem in this book is only a perk to a solid book of poetry. 
Love Minus Love has the signature precise word choice and droll wit with which Holloway-Smith always writes, along with a somewhat eerie undertone of darkness as he explores themes of childhood and family and mental health. 
The fact that the poems seem to run together, motifs and phrases cropping up again and again, only appeals to me more, causing the collection to feel like a story that's parceled out to us one piece at a time.