Each section of LOVE IS A PLACE BUT YOU CANNOT LIVE THERE (Guernica Editions, 2023) is a psychogeographic investigation. Two casual ghost hunters on a road trip hear the death rattle of their relationship. Residents of a city’s fringe measure their physical and social isolation. A mother and her adult child have diametrically opposed reactions to their vacation spot. Lovers on a romantic coastal getaway discover how estranged they are from one another. Curious figures begin to embody their environments. Forthright and anecdotal, these poems recount the signals people transmit and receive, and the reciprocal ways we make, and are made by, the places we inhabit.

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“Jade Wallace’s inventive debut poetry collection reminds us that we are all fundamentally travellers. These poems are psychogeographic maps attentive to the margins and sidelines of intellectual, emotional, and historical journeys that are often overwhelmed by their ostensible destinations. Preferring instead the spaces between, these poems are open to the potential wonder and mystery of the world in its contingency and complexity where “it’s hard to be sure we were there at all.” Skyscrapers, reversing falls, small towns defined by tire fires—travel is a mode of movement and critical self-reflection in this extraordinary book.” 
—Adam Dickinson, Griffin Poetry Prize Judge, author of Anatomic

“Firmly anchored in the tradition of the Southern Ontario Gothic, Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There maps the eerie unmappable. Attentive to everyday violence, horror, and beauty, the poems in this collection follow their speakers through rural and suburban Southwestern Ontario, to corner stores, motels, apartments, tourist towns, ghost towns, and skeleton museums. Jade Wallace writes with tenderness, humour, and a haunting perspicacity that is all their own.”
—Annick MacAskill, Governor General’s Award Winner for Shadow Blight

“Love is a Place But You Cannot Live There explores and subverts the haunted corners of the rural and urban—the haunting corners of ourselves. Wallace’s curious, nimble, and nostalgic words land with the halcyon sweetness of Ambrosia salad, the unsettling significance of an abandoned house. There’s music in this phenomenal collection—ballads and dirges; symphonic elegies of road-trip gothic.”
—Hollay Ghadery, Reviews Editor for Minola Review, author of Fuse

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Featured in CBC’s “46 Canadian poetry collections to watch for in spring 2023”
Featured in 49th Shelf’s “Most Anticipated: Our Spring 2023 Poetry Preview”
Featured in Hamilton Review of Books‘ “What We’re Reading: Staff Writers’ Picks, Spring 2023”