I’ve never read a book quite like Flourescence. The entire thing feels like a puzzle, it tells a story, but I have to re-read and analyze each and every poem after I read it. Every single poem, every line, every word, is riddled with meaning. Someone once told me that poetry is “the removal of excess verbiage, leaving only the essence of a pure emotion or a moment in time and space” and Dick’s book is a testament to that definition.
The emotions are raw, and the moments in time that are explored are so profoundly moving that the book feels like taking a dive into her mind. The most effective technical aspect of the book was how it shifts between different times sporadically in almost a stream-of-consciousness way at certain points. I think it’s very effective in conveying her state of mind (and probably PTSD) and making the reader experience it as she did.
I liked how the book becomes clearer and clearer as it concludes, the stanzas turning into paragraphs and the fragments turning into a more sentence-like structure. Her thoughts become more coherent every page, and it’s absolutely heartbreaking.
My favorite part about her writing style was the way she used sentences fragments and the expectations of the reader to say things without saying them. There’s a theory in film that montages are created by the connotations behind shots (words) and the conflict between them, and I think this also applies to Flourescence. Dick takes our expectations about what she’s going to say, and contrasts them with what she’s about to say next, creating tension in a way that would otherwise feel fake and would be largely ineffective.
TL;DR: Jennifer Dick wrote a wonderful book entitled Flourescence, and you should totally read it if you want to ponder some deep things and revel in her mastery of what words can do.
My Creative Writing Interblag 