Here's a quote from the book's press release:
Arch humor, grisly survival stories, erotic nostalgia and tales of romantic ruin all have their place in a collection as diverse in tone as it is in literary technique. In these pages, surprising experimental prose comes shoulder to shoulder with thoughtful, hard-edged eroticism; muscular character- or story-based fiction shares bunk-beds with the work of local colorists or memoirists, and satirists jostle stylists. The Ex-Files is as much a portfolio of the diverse strategies being explored by the current generation of literary artists as it is a catalog of the ways modern love fades and can return to haunt us.

I think it's an interesting topic, and I think this book does a good job covering a lot of ground, from the bittersweet to the merely bitter. By looking at romance in the past tense, these stories strip away the idea that real emotion happens only in pure form. A lot of the poems on the Love Blender hunt for that perfection: they are pure happiness, pure sadness, pure joy, pure despair. Some of that has to do with the form, it's not always easy to cover ambiguous ideals in a few verses. These short stories are big enough to capture the complexity of true life, small enough to be each enjoyed in a single sitting.

The end of Elissa Wald's "Real Men" shows some of this ambiguity, where a relationship that seems doomed from the start turns out to be doomed after all.

There's only one aspect of the whole thing that I do know for sure:

That night, the night we met in the air, Dean asked me, "What if I had said all this two weeks ago? How would you have felt?"

And I imagine that scenario sometimes. I imagine myself saying goodbye, I imagine myself thinking good riddance. He was right when he said that if we went further and deeper, one of us was going to really get hurt. So, in light of what happened afterward, do I wish it had gone that way? Do I wish he'd made his proposal - the proposal to just be friends -- two weeks earlier?

***

I've asked myself that so many times since, and if I were sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the only honest answer I could give myself is no. No, because the memory and mystery of that night is still worth everything to me -- everything that came afterward, everything I carry around now. And all I know for sure is that my answer will stay the same, even if it always stays as heavy as it is, even if I never get to put it down, even if I will always carry it alone.

So go get this book! You can Get it from Amazon (and kick back a very little bit to the Blender), but who wants to wait? Go to your local bookseller- bonus points if it's not one of those big monster chains.

It's a great read.