Love surges and searches for explanation and definition throughout Jonathan Katz’s Love Undefined. Again and again these poems achieve moments of recognition of the undefinable feeling of passion and of love. The poems bear close reading and re-reading. They are often complex puzzles laced with spurts of joy and rhythm. I learned things I didn’t know that I needed to know like the size of bluet petals, the night life of barrier reefs, the journeys of the Mona Lisa. I have never enjoyed more the companionship of a dictionary and encyclopedia than while navigating Jonathan’s poem, “Nazar”. And though these poems are truly enjoyable to read they are webbed with moral questions, challenges to orthodoxy, and dares as in his poem “Courage,” where we are challenged to embrace passion and “flirt with the option to ruin our own life”. Big questions, joyful poems.
— Robert L. Lynch, President and CEO, Americans for the Arts
Jonathan Katz’s love poems are alive with an appetite to continue the process of discovery that is at the very root of intimacy. He is working in a mode that calls to mind Neruda’s “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees” — his longing is celebratory and expansive. These poems hold counsel with the heart, the heart that beckons “for you I always will be here.”
— Elizabeth Scanlon, Poet and Editor, American Poetry Review
The poems that make up Love Undefined are those of a lover — of the juice and joy of words, of metaphor and simile, alliteration, personification, neologisms. Jonathan Katz’s poetry is an imagistic plenitude of all that is alive, organic and inorganic: from trees and insects to shells on the beach to the color red! In dazzling lines, JKatz will riff in elaborative and surprising tropes that awaken the ordinary, while in a more deliberate lyricism he writes of eros in the most nuanced of love poems.
— Merrill Leffler, Poet and Publisher, Dryad Press
