True Love and Smoke

More than a collection of excellent poem and evocative art, True Love and Smoke (TLS) is a visual and emotional (as opposed to intellectual) (auto) biography in which the author charts a near obsessive relationship with romantic love; a relationship full of longing, possession and loss. Combining the man-child earnestness of a Judd Apatow character with the self-critical gaze of Eminem at his best, the staggering sincerity and outsized id encouraged by a confident ego of the text and pictures conjures the feelings one gets when listening to a Kanye album. That is a good thing. Like that emcee, J.T. Kade invites us into the psyche of his generation. However, instead of meeting at the crossroads of fame and insecurity, he compells us to ponders the nexus of eros and neurosis.