In writings by the French post-structuralists, rhetorical tropes such as speechlessness, fragmentation, and deflection testify to the writer's difficulty in broaching the subject of love. Similarly, Cook shows that love poetry proceeds out of a profound failure of language resulting from the opacity of discourse, its lack of neutrality, or the fugitive transparency of reference. Writing Lovers also explores race, ethnicity, age, and sexual identity within the context of the passionate excesses of amatory discourse.