The title of the poem, ​“The Love Ridge Loop”, is, no doubt, some­thing of a joke, an exag­ger­a­tion built on irony. After all, the poem is an iron­ic love poem, and, at the same time, an anti-dog poem. But it allows for some­thing else, a poem about the unre­li­a­bil­i­ty of affec­tion, of how, in love, we dare not admit to the ani­mal dan­ger in those we love or, at least, own in love. Abbie Kiefer​’s poem res­onates nice­ly for those of us who view with deep skep­ti­cism, the expressed assur­ances of our safe­ty by pet-own­ers, while we walk among unleashed dogs in our neighborhoods.