Kim Addonizio writes plain-spoken, accessible poems in which real things happen to real people, many of them Kim Addonizio. What Is This Thing Called Love weighs in at about a hundred and ten pages, and it covers everything from cancer to alcoholism to ex-boyfriends in a voice that is resolutely conversational—when Addonizio says "you" and "I," she is usually talking about her and us. In the best poems here, the atmosphere of casual intimacy is underwritten by the deft use of form, as in the strong sonnet "Stolen Moments." The poem begins:

What happened, happened once. So now it's best
in memory—an orange he sliced: the skin
unbroken, then the knife, the chilled wedge
lifted to my mouth, his mouth, the thin
membrane between us, the exquisite orange,
tongue, orange, my nakedness and his,
the way he pushed me up against the fridge—

The swirling metaphors (and the cheeky rhyme on "orange") are well-suited to the sexy subject, and the disciplined rhyming holds everything together. Elsewhere, though, Addonizio seems to lose focus—a serious problem, since without carefully planned structures, her poetry quickly degenerates into line-broken chatting, with all the breathless disorganization that implies. The book's closing poem, "Kisses," for example, first imagines all the kisses the speaker has ever received rising up "as a delicate, roseate rash," and then, three lines later, the kisses are "a fine, shiny / grit," immediately after which the speaker somehow becomes "a pale / fish that's been dipped in a thick swirl of raw egg and dragged through flour." Dinner guests, consider yourselves warned.

— David Orr