MOSQUITO
w/introduction by Mark Doty“‘When I say hello, it means bite my heart,’ begins one of the poems in Alex Lemon’s startlingly raw and raucous first book. Speakers declare, ‘I am Hi-Fi, all of me is surround / sound,’ and describe a painting of the self as having ‘eyes like megaphones.’ Reading these poems is like having your five senses turned up to an almost unbearable volume. Sight: ‘I could see the patch of hair you’d missed shaving / glow on your calf like a gold brick in an Iowa cornfield.’ Sound: “What named me, the moth pleads, banging jazz from light bulbs.’ Taste: ‘I eat fr’zen strawberries.’ Touch: ‘Maybe, the surgeon said, / caressing my head like a hurricane.’ Lemon’s ardent search for beauty and mercy in Mosquito is transformative and true.”
—Matthea Harvey, author of Sad Little Breathing
Machine: Poems
“Broken and brilliant, protean and written in blood, these poems are missives from the other side, the should-have-almost-died side, the burning-but-not-consumed side, and all Alex Lemon offers to console us are ‘the nails on [his] tongue.’ Mosquito introduces a thrilling new voice in American poetry.”
—Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City“In these days of vast changes in American poetry, it is a joy to read the work of Alex Lemon. His poems pull the reader into a world of familiarities, while they confront daily experience in totally surprising ways. Mosquito means there is something there, so you better grab it before it disappears or becomes something else. It also means the vibrancy of these poems comes from the union between the microscopic and the panoramic—that focus of vision most poets spend a lifetime exploring. To show this kind of confidence and sense of direction means we have a major young poet on our hands. And, for poetry, that is the most vital gift it can receive.”
—Ray Gonzalez, author of Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected PoemsIn this edgy, energetic, even frenetic debut from a rising star of the Midwest, Lemon's jagged, commanding voice both charms and shocks: “Voice, be amazing/ circling the river bottom,” his leadoff poem instructs. The first section (of four) stuns with accessible yet intense language, and also with the events it appears to describe: brain surgery and the poet's slow recovery from it. “Tomorrow my head opens,” he says; “If I am still/ here, someone let me know what I am.” Subsequent poems steer clear of medical topics in favor of sparkling, slightly diffuse cascades of images: “It is the year of the dismembered horse/ Bury me with bones instead of eyes.” Crackling extremes court melodrama knowingly, challenging readers to say when enough is enough. Lemon's rawness and intelligence have a fine, in-your-face excess. Physical violence—“chipped-teeth,” “kicked-heart,/ dried blood”—recurs as experience and symbol, as do a series of crime novel and film noir backdrops: “always, I’m decapitated,” Lemon claims, “& feel as though someone is tracing/ The zippers of my self-inflicted bites.” Above all, these poems make strong impressions, using their verbal surprises as confrontational flirtations, or else tiny explosives.
—Publishers Weekly, June 26, 2006The poems in Alex Lemon’s striking first book document the experience of undergoing brain surgery, an agonizing recovery, and the sudden discovery of Eros, who finally emerges as the ultimate emblem of survival. Careful yet raw, the fresh sutures that comprise the lines in many of these poems sing of pain so sharply as to verge on ethereal. Yet, in other poems, Lemon approaches recollection as a butcher does a carcass, bludgeoning necessarily harsh and decisive strikes in order to determine the boundaries of his experience. Here, we have the body as poem: as Lemon so beautifully describes, “Melodies drill deep wells in the chest.”
—Cate Marvin, Ploughshares (Winter 2006-07)[Read Excerpt] [Purchase from Amazon.com]
Links on Web
Rick Barot on Alex Lemon (from Pleiades 25:1)
“Better Cleaning With Voodoo” in The Journal
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