The Hell with Love

January 1, 2002
Those looking to poetry to ease a recent breakup won't have to thumb through painfully irrelevant odes to joy any longer. The pocket-sized The Hell with Love: Poems to Mend a Broken Heart, edited by Mary D. Esselman and Elizabeth Ash Velez, organizes its contents according to the stages of heartbreak ("anger," "sadness," etc.). Most are by well-known 20th-century U.S. poets: William Carlos Williams, Louise Gleck, Sharon Olds, though Donne, Shakespeare and Larkin also make appearances. Predictable selections (Margaret Atwood's "You Fit Into Me") are balanced out by a few eccentric, perhaps witty curatorial decisions, such as the inclusion of Auden's "Musee Des Beaux Arts" in the section called "Moving On."