Ask someone to define love and they will usually reach for a comparison: a fire, a home, a promise. Jane Odair's "Poem #24: Love" refuses all of that. It asks the question twice and fills the space between with denials, so that by the end we know a great deal about what love is not and nothing at all about what it is. That gap is the poem's subject. Love, it suggests, slips out of every category we have for understanding the world.
The structure is simple and very deliberate. The poem opens and closes with the same two lines, "Love? / What is love?", so the question wraps around everything in between like a frame. Nothing has been settled when we return to it. If anything, the second asking sounds different from the first. At the start it reads like an honest, open question. At the end, after all the failed answers, it sounds more puzzled, perhaps even a little helpless. The poem has moved without going anywhere, which is exactly how it feels to circle a question you can't answer.
The middle is a run of three pairs: "a thing" and "a feeling," "physical" and "mental," "permanent" and "temporary." Each pair covers a different way of sorting experience. The first splits the world into objects outside us and sensations inside us. The second splits a person into body and mind. The third splits everything by time, whatever lasts and whatever doesn't. These are the sorting boxes we use most often, and the speaker tips love out of every one of them. The last pair is the most unsettling, because "permanent" and "temporary" seem to cover every possibility. Something that is neither breaks the logic we normally trust, and the poem leaves that break exposed rather than explaining it.
The way the lines are built reinforces this. Each pair follows the same pattern: a full statement ("It's not a thing") and then a clipped echo ("Not a feeling") with the "It's" dropped. The repetition feels like someone ticking off options, and the shortened second line sounds like a quick shake of the head. There is no rhyme, and none is needed, since the grammar supplies the pattern. Lines run from one word to four, and the short ones give the poem a hesitant, staccato pace. "Love?" is a single beat on its own line, a held breath before the longer, slower "What is love?", where all three words weigh almost the same. There is also a faint sound-link between "permanent" and "temporary," which share their m-sounds and their ending rhythm, so the two opposites almost seem to rhyme with each other even as the poem rejects both.
Punctuation adds one more quiet detail. Every line in the middle ends with a comma, and the poem never uses a full stop. A comma says that more is coming, so the list feels unfinished, as though the speaker could keep going. The only closing marks are the question marks, which is where the poem finally lands.
The poem also has almost no imagery, and that absence is a choice. We expect a poem about love to give us roses, hearts or weather. Odair gives us "a thing," about the vaguest noun in English, and then takes even that away. The result is bare and abstract, and the reader has to supply the pictures. Whatever love looks like in the poem, it looks like whatever you bring to it. Nothing on the page tells us the speaker's tone. It could be frustration, wonder or quiet humility, and each reading changes the poem. The title's numbering ("Poem #24") hints that this is one of a series, but the text alone tells us nothing more about that.
What makes the poem worth reading is how well form and meaning fit together. It defines by negation, and in doing so it shows that some things resist definition. A longer poem might have tried to answer, and any answer would have been smaller than the question. Odair leaves the answer open, and a reader who thinks of something love might be, perhaps a choice, a relationship or an action, has done what the poem was inviting them to do.