I have been following Orion Carloto’s work for some time, so when I heard she was releasing her first book, I jumped at the chance to preorder it. On October 24, 2017, Flux was officially released.
I was extremely excited to finally have Orion’s words physically in my hands after years of engaging with her work online. The soft, paperback cover decorated with an Emily Weber illustration (a tattoo artist I have coincidentally been following on Instagram for years as well) sold me right away. I instantly knew this was a book I would take with me many places, read again and again, and find new reasons to love it after every reread.
Orion litters the inside of Flux with actual scanned excerpts of her personal notebooks, drawings, and pages and pages of prose. Most of her prose is short, delicate, and simple, but every once in a while she surprises her reader with paragraphs of her inner most thoughts and feelings.
I admire Flux because of its stripped back style. Orion is not in the business of creating pretentious poetry, or poetry that consistently conforms to a particular pattern (although sometimes her pieces venture into formal form). In creating this collection, Orion was determined to lay out her heart for the world to see, and she did just that.
It is refreshing to read about love and heartbreak from the perspective of a bisexual girl. She bounces around with pronouns, exploring all aspects of the different romantic experiences she has had in her life so far.
In addition to the classic love and heartbreak pieces, Flux touches on topics like mental health, manipulation, and self-love. Orion completely bares her soul to her audience, and it pays off.
Flux will decorate my bedside through the rest of autumn and well into winter, I suspect, as I lean on her words throughout my own journey with writing, loss, and self-love.