Fluorescence

Jennifer K. Dick's Fluorescence was quite interesting. Of all the books, I think this was the most confusing and most annoying to read. The content in the poems were pretty difficult to understand. In my group, we discussed a few poems that we thought were the most interesting. After having our group discussions, it made things a bit clearer.

My favorite poem in this book was “In the Garden”. I thought this was the most animated or 'alive' poem. This really evoked all of the senses and provided some intense detail to describe what was happening. She really painted a picture in my head by giving several metaphors and similes. The structure was in paragraph form, which kinda gave a fast pace to the poem. While I was reading it, I noticed I was saying it really fast in my head and this gave me a feeling of emotion that was occurring with the characters. Which leads me to another thing, the characters. This gave me the idea that the narrator was telling a story. She mentioned a man, woman and Eve. While written in the third person, she provides a detailed scenario of what the woman is doing. The language was very flowy and pretty, but used in a sensual and seductive manner. I could feel a strong sense of passion in the poem, as well. She uses powerful words, for example, in the sentence on page 43, “her distaste, body sweat, wants the first apple rounding smooth as a poison icicle'. This was so interesting for me because it is a great example of 'showing vs. telling'.

Another poem that we talked about in class was “Sighted” on page 47. This poem was written in a different style or layout than “In the Garden”. All the words were broken down into short statements, similar to Ed Roberson's City Eclogue. This gave the the feeling that the poem was written as an occurring action, or in the present tense. While I found this to be quite poetic, I also found many narrative qualities such as dialogue and creating characters. I thought it was kind of confusing at times because the sentences had a weird flow to them. It was all one big sentence yet all the words led into another idea. For example, she says, “Graded, grading, What grade are you in? Looks up pomegranate peeled to look inside turn around at his face gaze over between pages and seventh he smiles”. At the time I was reading it, it made no sense, but once I completed the whole poem I go the idea. Also, she uses a lot of the same words just in different tenses. For example, 'looked for, looking, look at' and 'graded, grading, grade'. I thought that was a bit different.

The final poem we discussed was Looking Glass on page 76. This poem was very active, she used a lot of action words which really put an image in my mind. I thought the poem was also very weird. The genre was more like a narrative telling a story, or even a tale. I did not think this was very poetic at all, mainly because the language was so weird. She used words like 'trundles, flip-floping, hobbles', and these words kinds have a big sound to them. A sentence that really stuck in my head the most was when she said 'an alligator trundles by a man vomiting while salmon into the street'. I thought this was so disturbing but I couldn't stop thinking about it! Overall, the poem was weird but that’s what I like about it.