Vertigo: Of Love & Letting Go

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed this epic poem and would definitely recommend it to people that are not familiar with poetry and want to delve into it. This book was more than just a simple read. There is a corresponding website and a playlist created that goes along with reading this book, which adds so much to your reading experience, while the illustrations within the book manage to build up the world, thus creating an almost palpable atmospheric setting.

Through this poem we experience the journey of a man that falls in love and struggles not only with his loved one but also with himself. Love, loss and God are the three main themes woven with his existence, and the narration allowed me to feel his thoughts and emotions while reading them. This poem served like a journal to his experience, and it managed to take me along for the ride. While reading this, I saw love depicted as something greater that the narrator, as if he himself becomes a channel to this vast power that love has, a power that calls to him, and a force that he utilizes so as to get close to his object of affection, searching for relief. The parallel between the human existence and the cosmic universe is extraordinary to me, simply because I am interested in everything that has to do with space. There are also annotations at the end of the book, which helped me make sense of what some words symbolized or where the poet derived his inspiration from.

I would definitely recommend this book and see myself rereading it.

Vertigo reads like the emotions stitched into my heart, the ones almost impossible to express, to utter aloud. It follows the pattern of an epic poem, a story broken and jilted, at odds with itself and I love it for the humanity inside it. It talks about love, loss, searching, but not always finding, closure. It's a beautiful work of art that reveals the worst - and best - of our intentions as human beings.

I've never read anything from this poet before. I'm glad I have.

This book was definitely a well crafted piece of literature. With every word you read, you can feel the effort the writer put into making it, and that personal feeling that wafted from this book was what endeared Vertigo to me.

I requested this because of the cover. Let's be real about this for a second. I just love beautiful covers that much. I mean, look at it!!!!

The poetry itself was pretty good. I didn't love it but I liked it enough to keep going and finishing it. In the beginning I found so many parts that I just had to highlight and I thought this was going to be my new favorite things. It didn't.

The farther I went into the book, I didn't feel anything anymore. The words were beautiful but they just didn't speak to me and didn't move me in a way that I wanted them to. So this is once again a 'It's not you, it's me' book, cause it's beautiful (the words and the pictures!!!), it just didn't work for me, but I totally see how this would work for other people.

Beautifully written book. I loved the aspects this book went into. I extremely enjoyed it and I would believe anyone who read the premise of the book will also like this book too.

When I opened this book, I expected to find a collection of poetry, but instead, I found a story about a love so dizzying that it stays with you forever, one way or another. This is the type of poetry that you either love or hate. De Leon relies heavily on nature metaphors to describe his feelings toward this lover as he tells the story, but that is something I love about poetry. It just feels magical to me. In fact, the metaphor about candles and light that the author explains in the foreword is one I've never come across and sets the tone for the entire book. This story of "love and letting go" is something that we can all relate to on some level because love, whether that love is romantic or otherwise, is just such a human experience.