Poetic prose

Here's the first sentence of "All the Colors of the Dark" by Chris Whitaker -

From the flat roof of the kitchen Patch looked out through serried pin oaks and white pine to the loom of St. Francois Mountains that pressed the small town of Monta Clare into its shade no matter the season.

In The Republic of Letters Tyson Duffy writes "Just read the sentence aloud to feel in your mouth how awkward the words are together. By the time you reach the end, you attain a kind of empty-headed, Nirvana-like state of senseless bafflement". He asks "What is “loom of St. Francois Mountains”?" and "How is a small town pressed into its shade?"

When I read "Small Worlds", a novel by Caleb Azumah Nelson, I wondered about the poetic language. Generously, I thought that the narrator (a thoughtful 18 year old much of the time) might think that way. He likes spatializing emotion - "the way desire might spill into the space", "somewhere between content and melancholy", etc. Other examples of imagery and poetical phrasing include -

• Del's lips hold a brief home on my cheeks and we pull each other close. We give no goodbyes, we know death in its multitudes
• It's funny what you remember, what palaces you make to store the fragments
• I am the beach disappeared by the tide, I am the breath between two notes
• the way thunder asks you to check the sky for rain
• June veers towards July
• light clasps onto her neck
• shyness visits upon us
• it was the time of day when the sun was leaving the sky

I don't mind some of this, but some is more than purple prose - it's off the end of the colour spectrum. I don't think it's the kind of prose that poets (Plath, John Burnside, etc) write.