'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 mode of storytelling, whereby interviews with fourteen couples are poetically crafted into rhythmic, syllabic verse. For 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 demands of extended family, geographic distance or migration. Yet these are sanguine stories that transcend the trials of the everyday, making real the possibility of mutual love and joy over a lifetime.

About the author: Barbara Kamler is a Melbourne poet and Emeritus Professor of Education at Deakin University. She is the author or editor of nine academic books and over sixty journal articles and book chapters on literacy, writing pedagogy and identity. Her poetry has appeared in publications such as 'The Age', 'The Australian', 'Australian Poetry Journal', 'Poetrix', 'Poetry New Zealand', as well as various anthologies.