The pathogen arrives anyway and takes a seat at the table. Conditioned to welcome damage, I am curious about this uninvited guest. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.

In Lovebug, Daisy Lafarge explores metaphors of love and disease as she seeks to understand human vulnerability and our intimacy with microbial life.

Turning to microbiology, mysticism, and psychoanalysis – as well as the raw materials of love and life – Lafarge navigates the uncomfortable intimacy between the human body and the many bacteria, viruses, and parasites to which it is host.

Lovebug is a book about the poetics of infection, and about how we can learn to live with multispecies ambivalence. How might we forge non-phobic relationships to our ‘little beasts’? How might we rewild our imaginations? In weaving the personal with the pathological, Lovebug complicates the idea of coherent selfhood, revealing life as a site of radical vulnerability and an ongoing negotiation with limit.

‘A brilliant and engrossing poetic meditation on the self that places its multitudes under a kaleidoscopic microscope. Lovebug takes up the risks involved in living and loving, as well as the radical vulnerability required to be open to the spectrum of intensities – from animating to infecting – that lead to irrevocable change.’ ­– Nuar Alsadir

‘Lovebug is a wonder. With her warm, welcoming intelligence and razor-sharp prose, Daisy Lafarge moves from microbiology to poetry, from chronic illness to crushing desire. Lovebug is at once a work of critical theory, an intellectual biography, and a detective story, in which nothing less is at stake than the mystery of our connection to one another. It’s also that rare find: a serious book that’s impossible to put down, infectious in the very best sense of the word.’ – Anahid Nersessian