The mind in love is an Eden, and a labyrinth; a return to innocence, and a serpent that seduces itself. Like a walled garden in the modern city, the mind under love's power is a paradise that flourishes and delights in the shadow of a fallen world. This book of twenty-first century love poems follows the intricate, often-bewildering ways of the mind in love and pursues its themes, like Ariadne's thread, through a maze of voices that range from that of a young Salome confronting her first loss to that of an eleventh-century Japanese courtesan as her grip on her emotions begins to unravel, in and out of poems that spin like pots on wheels and spread out across the page like a Rorschach test. The beings who populate ''Leaving Eden'' are a surprising and familiar combination of sophisticated and artless. They are worldly but not cynical, guileless without being callow, at once rueful and unblinking, fearless and trusting.Displaying a wit that is not above flirting with heat, and a self-awareness liable to slip into self-abandon, these characters seem to awaken into their dramas like dreamers, as if to demonstrate that we don't lose our innocence once and for all, but over and over again, and as if to prove that not only is every state of innocence followed by a fall, it also emerged from one. Like us, the characters in these poems know better and nevertheless let themselves be beguiled again and again. Like us, they are skeptical, and like us, they fall -- apart, flat, from grace, sometimes with grace, in and out of love, into and through the words and worlds love conjures -- again and again, as the mind, over and over, seeks to find its way out of, and back into, that best image of itself: love's Eden.