As a poet, the late James Laughlin was perhaps best known for his love lyrics. Marjorie Perloff wrote: "Who else...writes such bittersweet, ironic,. rueful, erotic, tough-minded, witty love poems, poems that run the gamut from ecstasy to loss?" In "Parnassus," Jonathan Williams asks "Did the Roman masters (Horace, Catullus, Propertius, Martial, Ovid), leave as many excellent poems amongst the whole lot of them, as [James Laughlin] did on his own?" Guy Davenports notes that Laughlin's poems are "the wittiest and sexiest...of our time." This small paperbook of his finest love poems is a perfect memorial to one of the 20th century's most important men of letters."