“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.”

“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 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.”