Open Letters is a passionate, persuasive collection about finding beauty and meaning in a world that moves faster than us. If we are captured souls with fleeting dreams, then Booth-Jones' poems are living, breathing and reaching through the bars, holding fallen leaves and faded polaroids. The collection fluctuates between liminality and longing, capitalism and contentment, showing defiance by shaping their echoes. At the edge of the sky, drenched in advertisements and sunlight, the moon eats, the wind laughs and Booth-Jones writes letters. We are brighter and more gentle for it.
Readers will find themselves lost in the intense observations of a world both 'impossible and real' in this series of missive-poems slowly unfurling through each line. Often transcendent, sometimes wry, always soulful and beautiful, this series of letters addresses hypothetical lovers, the city and the self, amongst others-delivering a sequence which is rich, profound, personal and completely addictive.
It is not easy to follow a successful first collection but with Open Letters to the Sky, Booth-Jones does it with aplomb.