Block's poetry is stranger than her prose. I much prefer the prose. ( )

I received this book as part of the Early Reviewers program in June and only just managed to get around to reading it. I love poetry but I'm very picky about my novels in verse and this one did not live up to my standards. There were some very well-written parts but I felt that most of the novel didn't flow or portray enough for me to get into and enjoy the story told by the poems. A let down. ( )

When I saw OPEN LETTER TO QUIET LIGHT on the ER list, I was hoping that I'd be lucky enough to get a copy. I'm a poet who adores books of poetry, and a writer who enjoys Block's novels and short stories and has taught a few of them in her classes. Block's quirky storytelling style and her lyrical prose make her a personal favorite.

While the cover of the collection with its surreal artwork reinforced my expectations for the collection, sadly, the poems themselves did not live up to them.

The musicality of Block's prose writing was lost in her poetry, where much of the language lacked the compression, tightness, and crispness of poetry. And of Block's prose. In many ways, I think OPEN LETTER TO QUIET LIGHT would have read better as a collection of flash fictions or vignettes.

While the collection didn't quite work for me as poetry, I did enjoy the overall narrative arcs in the collection, the journey that unfolds from poem to poem. However, I did find similar themes to repeat a little too much for my taste, making the pacing seem slow and the collecton a bit bloated. The bit with the meanings of the narrator's lover's name and then her own at the end formed a particularly lovely and powerful thread of continuity and closure.

I'm a poetry geek, so I was very excited to receive this book as an early reviewer from LibraryThing.

The first thing that drew me in was the gorgeous cover which I can find something new in every time that I look at it. I was really hoping that the poetry inside would offer the same sort of depth.

Some did. Poems like "phoenix" and "organic roses" had the sort of depth that I was expecting. Many did not. There were certain images that were reused too much and lost their power by the third reiteration. As a cycle of poetry, it does bring the bare skeleton of the story Block was trying to tell to life. However, it really was left at that, bare bones. The more I read about these two people, the more I wanted to hear poems that fleshed them out more, gave more reasons for her motivations. From the start, it is evident that our narrator is an unreliable one, and only offers up the information that will best suit her case, as we never really find out what it was that caused her love to leave her.

Over all, it was an interesting take on a poem cycle that was an easy read to breeze through. It would have resonated with me more if there had been more poems there, again, to give flesh to bones. ( )

Gorgeous cover, beautiful story told in poetry form -- super-passionate -- Francesca Lia Block dives deep to harvest complicated emotions in this book. It left me feeling happy, sad, wistful and hopeful all at the same time. Wow! ( )