Fluorescence

Reviews / Votes

Fluoresence is moving. Both emotionally engaging and in motion to match the realities of our moment, Jennifer Dick's poems are accountable to the truths of a violent kaleidoscope world. Terrorism and suicide are part of this landscape, but this poet is equally dedicated to an understanding of the internal tensions of the lyric voice and the human heart. 'The dream [is] already morphosing,' where our loves and lives are broken into shifting fragments and echoes, 're-returned' under threat of erasure. Her gift is to have found in the shards a new language with the energy and beauty of a Delaunay composition: her poems lift up into light all we cherish, all we should most fear to lose. -- Laura Mullen * author of <i>After I Was Dead</i> * The project underlying this collection is precision, and Jennifer Dick carries it out beautifully, always keeping her language as sharp and explorative as her questioning. A strong, beautiful book throughout. -- Cole Swensen * author of <i>Goest</i> * Jennifer Dick's painterly use of repeated motif is masterful, expressive, quite extraordinary. 'What isn't to be trusted is translated': Dick's translations delineate danger-imminent and experienced-particularly beautifully. Fluorescence includes a variety of poetic approaches; throughout, one feels the poet's intelligent presence and a moving 'hope to verify.' -- Carol Snow * author of <i>The Seventy Prepositions: Poems</i> * 'I am just a streak of color passing. // Can you hold me?' writes Jennifer Dick midway through this resonant collection of poems. The fugitive blur of selfhood-and the desire to be 'held' captive within identity-is the human problem that governs her work throughout. Reading the book is like watching film footage of an explosion at a railway station in reverse; we begin with language in diaspora-words scattered across the page, across consciousness, across the political map-and we arrive, curiously, at a reconstituted world of forms. It is the literary progression from trauma toward understanding; and readers, in the end, will be left with the timely and ethical understanding that words are 'abbreviations for what is in their hands.' -- Srikanth Reddy * author of <i>Facts for Visitors: Poems</i> * All of this exploratory and inventive work ultimately becomes heartfelt music for the reader. . . . This is great stuff. -- <i>Stride Magazine</i>