Reader, the book you hold is made of poems which make a novel constantly unmaking itself; an (unfinished) essay on "Unrealistic Conceptions of Love in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano"; and a letter from a former lover to a formerly beloved. Much of the book's matter is compressed into that most compact and demanding of fixed forms, the triolet, which, in Jesse DeLong's deft and artful hands, acts as a prism, refracting and defamiliarizing language, thought, and feeling, and revealing the mind to itself as "a collage/ different than exists in the known universe." Also revealed: the heart, here a vessel for vinegar, that astringent, if flavorful, if no longer intoxicating, remnant of love. Maximalist and minimalist, brilliant and tender, The Vinegar in Our Hearts resists the constraining artifice of closure, offering instead "silence and solitude not as an emptiness, but as a fullness of self." Take it as it is offered: in kind.
