Love is a Mental Illness by Franco Cardiello

A consistently hard-hitting collection of poetry, Franco Cardiello’s Love is a Mental Illness strikes with precision again and again, drawing from the poet’s own experiences and laying them bare. Cardiello’s style is notably idiosyncratic and may take a poem or two to get used to his enigmatic flow of words, but the reader is soon drawn into the collection’s heart-wrenchingly realistic world of love, hope, trauma, pain, vulnerability, and honesty. A revolutionary work in its creativity and execution, this cross-genre collection works equally well as a work of lyric poetry and a form of self-help for those who see themselves in the poet’s recognizable struggles.