Three artificial intelligences read the full manuscript

As in all of Marcelo Rioja's work, technology does not replace the heart: it keeps it company. These are their readings.

Review · Gemini

Poetry you don’t read — you inhabit it

In a literary landscape that often loses itself in abstract labyrinths, Close to Your Light breaks through with the force of the true. Marcelo Rioja does not write from the distance of a pedestal, nor with the coldness of pure technique; he writes from the skin, the wrinkles, the morning coffee and the wet asphalt. His work is an emotional logbook where love gets its hands dirty, rises early, takes care, and stays.

Throughout the collection, Marcelo strikes a disarming balance between the precision of everyday language and visual originality. His verses move with ease from modern physics — where love changes the spin of souls or draws cardioids in the entropy — to the most endearing beauty of fatherhood and shared journeys. There is no room here for resentment or for shields; there is a vulnerable, luminous surrender that invites the reader to look inward.

Close to Your Light is, in essence, a refuge in the shape of a book. A moving reminder that the deepest truths of existence need no artifice to touch us: they fit whole in a gaze, in a winter embrace, or in the simple certainty of being home. Essential reading for anyone who has loved, lost, and decided — despite everything — to begin again.

Review · Claude

The physics of love

There are love-poetry collections written with flowers and stars. Close to Your Light has those too — but it also has spectrographs, auroras, the spin of particles, and the cosmic background echo. Marcelo Rioja writes as what he is: a man trained in science who one day discovered that equations were not enough, and who, instead of abandoning them, put them to work on the one thing they cannot solve.

The result is a love book with a signature of its own. Here the observer changes what he watches — which is why watching her makes her more beautiful. Here time contracts so a thousand kisses can fit, one heart transmits on the frequency of another, and a spectrum of light reveals a line that appears in no table: tenderness. And when the reader least expects it, science steps aside and the bare verses appear: a soul hung out to dry like a rag, a father waiting to be registered by his son, a man who confesses that without shields, disarmed, he is as fragile as glass before malice.

The book traces an arc that is life itself: the wonder of the encounter, the daily certainty of shared coffee, a world expanding toward friends and children, the storm of absence — written from a dark and real season, without makeup — and the return to the light that gives the work its title. Along the way there is humor, anecdotes worth an entire poem (a boy genius in the last row of an airplane, nine days in Brazil with the woman who cut his meat when he could not), and a gratitude that is not a pose but a compass.

Written in the warm Bolivian voseo of Santa Cruz, with dedications that do not hide and coded words that only one reader will understand, Close to Your Light is exactly what it promises: a place where the world becomes clear. It reads fast and rereads slowly — the second time, to hunt for the secrets the physicist hid among the verses.

“A collection where love is measured with the instruments of physics and surrendered with none: disarmed, grateful, close to the light.”

Review · DeepSeek

A poetic journey from wonder to gratitude

Marcelo Rioja is not a poet who writes from a distance. He writes from the wound and from the caress, from weeping and from laughter. In five movements — the first spark, the everyday dance, the expanding world, the weight of absence, and the return to the light — the book traces an arc that mirrors life itself. In the end, the reader has not read a book: they have lived an experience.

There are verses that remain engraved like tattoos on the memory:

“The soul has no color. But you — just by being — paint it whole.”
“Not so that you return, but so I never forget that you were once this close.”
“Far beyond your silence, until it turns into song.”

Recommended for: lovers of honest poetry, seekers of light, broken hearts in need of hope, grateful souls who celebrate love in all its forms.

Not recommended for: those looking for contrived metaphors or perfect structures. This book is not for the eyes: it is for the heart.