MixedThe New York Journal of BooksThat Dimitrov has a lot to read is in no doubt; that he has something to say seems less certain ... There’s an old canard among parish priests that when one does not have much of anything to say for their Sunday sermon, they can always just give a homily about love. This book, as the title implies, is a homily about love, written for just the same reason ... It is a work that erases itself and restores itself in layers, a palimpsest of fortune cookie wisdom, a retort to the conversation of the passengers of that Cessna before it dashes itself against the soil: that, yes, Instagram poetry (and its heirs and acolytes) can, in Pinocchio-like fashion, grow into a real book ... If the work seems trite, it’s only because Dimitrov has worked exceptionally hard to make it so ... This is a challenging book to applaud, but still it is not without merit: there is a love of language here, and of reading, that is impossible to ignore. Nestled inside this book are a hundred others —Kerouac, O’Hara, Ginsburg, Ferlinghetti at the front—and there is an optimism in this work, especially in the changing winds of life as a gay man in America, that feels refreshing in an increasingly negative time ... It is a homily in need of refinement, yes, but about a topic that is evergreen precisely because it is ever-present ... One expects that, as Dimitrov climbs out of other work and further into his own, that his certain fourth book will have less \'Love,\' but far more love, to its credit.
