Romance Utopia is both a publication and an ongoing research project into the romantic ruin: attempts to salvage romance from its boring or harmful uses and steer it toward something more unruly and radical. The book gathers fragments of this search (texts, images, prompts, and conversations) while accepting that looking for romance is always already a failed project (which is, in a way, the point).

The first text lays out the methodology and main argument of the research. Scattered through the book are visual works by Dagmar Bosma, Mafalda Costa, Mónica Mays, and Becket MWN, whose practices I read as carrying an aesthetic of romantic ruination. A second text takes the form of an interview with writer and artist Geraldine Snell, focusing on her book overlove (2018) and its obsessive romantic pursuit. In “A gesture: I had a dream about you” I explore dream-sharing as a romantic gesture, while the final text is a love-token writing prompt that invites readers to create a small written object that can wander beyond the pages of this book.