'Love, regardless—the second collection from Melbourne-based Barbara Kamler—is an enthralling gallery of poetic portraits celebrating love that endures. It features a unique, dialogic mode of storytelling, whereby interviews with fourteen couples are poetically crafted into rhythmic, syllabic verse. Each couple, each poem explores the intimacy of first connecting and the various complications negotiated along the way—crushing pressures of sexual or racial norms, the challenge of chronic illness or disparate histories, and the demands of extended family and geographic distance. Yet these are sanguine stories that transcend the trials of the everyday, making real the possibility of mutual love and joy over a lifetime.
'The characters in this volume are actual people, who live and love, and the events they impart really happen. However, it is Kamler’s deft hand that lifts and transfigures these experiences into poetry which moves the reader. Love, regardless is a beautiful and provocative collection that sings with the vitality of the spoken word. It is a tapestry of journeys as couples thread the past to the present—recounting the passion and pathos of long love—and the ways they move forward, together, regardless.' (Publication summary)
