The Wish Book

“The Wish Book captures the relief and ecstasy of survival: ‘we’re still / Alive!’ Every poem feels like an emergency, an embodiment of Federico García Lorca’s reminder that we might at any moment be eaten by ants, so we better make the most of this moment. And Alex Lemon’s work does, handling the frenetic language with such grace that it’s excusable to miss his sleights of hand. There seem to be no illusions at all, just genuine magic.”

“Death and life are, for most of us, too complex to comprehend, but Alex Lemon can pretty casually, accurately, and marvelously correlate them to heavy metal and birthday cake. With the exuberance of Whitman, the wingspan of Ashbery, and flickers of Richard Brautigan’s whimsy’n’anguish, Lemon reveals that the big picture is made up of an obsessive abundance of moments, tiny dots, flips, waves, and curves. Those details are the way we hear the great human song he’s singing.”

“Alex Lemon shines in his new collection, composed of tightly coiled, fast-paced lines and persistently unexpected images, such as jellyfish stuffed to bursting with diamonds, or flames shooting from kitchen faucets. In freewheeling sequences of seeming non sequiturs, Lemon blends the energy of a carnival barker with the precise prosody of a master craftsman, creating a literary Tilt-a-Whirl of touch-and-go emotions.”

“This book arrived like a storm, with an almost physical sense of Alex Lemon as a doom-tinged ecstasy engine. He’s so aware of death and so eager to refuse its dominion that the breath of his poems drives a blade into the reader’s mind that cuts a new window to both see and feel through. The great rhythmic vitality of his work is surpassed only by the pulse of his need to convey his love for the world and our place in it. To read this book is to meet a man who would climb the sky.”

“The fourth installment in Alex Lemon’s series of field guides to the new, weird normal, The Wish Book covers its lenses to neither birth nor death, which is to say that while it might not get you what you want, it offers up vivid wide shots of where you are, along with close-ups of your options therein, thereafter. Read it and look, leap.”

“The Wish Book is a glorious spectacle. Jazz and jibber-jabber collide. Ghosts, umbrellas, jellyfish, and ‘glittery dirt’ woo the eye. Kaleidoscopic phrasing underscores awe and dark humor. ‘Everything tastes / electric’ in one poem. The light waltzes in another, then is retooled as ‘a sunset of painkillers.’ At the heart of the spectacle lies an astonishing awareness of illness and death. Alex Lemon’s imagination is dazzling and empathic. He’s a ringmaster of the highest order.”