The Wish Book

The Wish Book
The Wish Book (back cover)
Poetry

The Wish Book

"To read this book is to meet a man who would climb the sky." —BOB HICOK
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In his follow-up to Fancy Beasts, a book that “slice[d] straight through nerve and marrow on its way to the heart and mind of the matter” (Tracy K. Smith), Alex Lemon dazzles with his exuberance and candor. Whether in unrestrained descriptions of sensory overload or tender meditations on fatherhood and mortality, Lemon blurs the nebulous line between the personal and the pop-cultural. These poems are full of frenetic energy and images pleasantly, strangely colliding: jigsaws and bathtubs and kung-fu and X-rays. A carnival barker calls. A jellyfish celebrates a shaky adulthood. A sliding door shatters with the passing through of a body. And a heart is “ecstatically / Torn apart like Twizzlers.”

Lean and muscular, The Wish Book is a collection of fireworks and wild emotion, defined by Lemon’s distinct brand of poetic edginess.

ISBN:
9781571314505
Publish Date: 
01/07/2014
Pages: 
136
Size: 
5.5 × 8.44 × 0.38 in
Weight: 
6.4 oz
Author

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 BlackoutFancy BeastsThe Wish Book, and Another Last Day. 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.

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