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.

Méira Cook is the award-winning author of the novels The House on Sugarbush Road, which won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, and Nightwatching, which won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. She has also published five poetry collections, most recently Monologue Dogs, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry and for the 2016 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. She won the CBC Poetry Prize in 2007 and the inaugural Walrus Poetry Prize in 2012. In 2011 she served as Writer in Residence at the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture, and was the 2013–14 Writer in Residence at the Winnipeg Public Library. Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, she now lives in Winnipeg.

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