Alex Lemon is a poet and the author of two works of nonfiction: Happy, selected by Kirkus as one of the best memoirs of 2010, and Feverland: A Memoir in Shards. His collections of poems include Mosquito, Hallelujah Blackout, Fancy Beasts, The Wish Book, and Another Last Day. His writing has appeared in Esquire, River Teeth, Best American Poetry, AGNI, Bomb, Pleiades, and many other magazines and journals. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a Jerome Foundation Fellowship, and a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, as well as the Paterson Award for Literary Excellence. He teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University and is Associate Professor at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, where he lives.
Ants drunk on cherry-red hummingbird nectar. An ambulance rushing into the distance. And rain, endless rain: turning pulpy with sunlight, seemingly on the verge of a flood. These are the moments of an ordinary day—rendered, throughout these poems, by a speaker so plugged into the livingness of this world that he is tossed to the edge of living itself.
Brain surgery; Rilke, Rodin, and the craters of the moon; monkeys stealing an egg outside a temple in Kathmandu; wildfires in southern California; a son born into a shadowy hospital room; love; joy. This is a fragmented exploration of what it means to be a man in twenty-first-century America—and a harrowing, associative memoir about how we live with the beauties and horrors of our pasts.
In unrestrained descriptions of sensory overload and tender meditations on fatherhood and mortality, these poems blur the nebulous line between the personal and the pop-cultural. This is a collection of fireworks and wild emotion, defined by the author’s distinct brand of poetic edginess.
California wildfires, the 2008 election, plastic surgery, Larry Craig, wildfires, Wal-Mart, and rampant commercialism—these poems take on American media culture, the obscene foil for personal legacies of violence and violation. This collection offers a frank, funny, and inimitably frenetic vision of post-millennial America.
Rapturous and electric, these poems take us through a glittering underworld of illness and recovery, on a confrontational, explosive trip that is at once euphoric and brutal. Without relying on familiar narratives of despair and pity, this collection serves as a tender hymn to the decay, crimes, and promise of human life.
