“You/ should have seen the sweat of still-being-alive,” writes Lemon in his sprawling, varied, and ambitious second collection. Thoughts of joy and pain, eros and death, not to mention references from Van Gogh to “half-scratched lotto tickets” collide in these unclassifiable, rapid-fire poems. Lemon (Mosquito) constantly asks the reader to take his complex ecstasies in one swallow, diction and image madly comingled: “Alleluia, asshole, amen./ “Together: let us eat.” Elsewhere, “a car wreck/ In my hands,” is followed by a plea to “Come with me tonight, my chocolate-/smelling love” At times the fever pitch of these poems is diminished through repetition, but the book’s two long poems—“Abracadaver” and the title piece—provide a counterpoint to Lemon’s freewheeling antics: a softer, more stripped-down voice amid the rush “in the matchbook of our heads.”

“A Chaplinesque vaudeville, both mirthful and moving; a pure-gospel shout to the vaulted heavens; a hatful of abracadabras with a wink and a smile: Hallelujah Blackout is a muscular, vibrant book. Painful without being pitying (‘I have little time to let mere ailments worry me’), inventive without being showy, this is an astonishing, masterful collection of poems.”

“The only thing more remarkable than Lemon's linguistic muscle is the blood singing up from his gut.”