Fancy Beasts

Author's Bio:

Quotes:

"A master of negative empathy, Lemon spelunks through the brain's darker convolutions and clearly enjoys testing the reader's limits. This book will likely appeal most to twenty-somethings with an emo/hipster bent, but even older readers will be impressed by Lemon’s calculated audacity."
—Library Journal (STARRED review)

"Full of raw energy, up-to-date in its slang and its jump cuts, effervescent with the playfulness and sometimes the angers of youth, [Fancy Beasts] conveys a likable, outsized personality. Like Tony Hoagland, Lemon is often self-conscious about the volatilities his poems convey, about their almost giddy tonalities, but he will not apologize for himself: adult life is a scary gift, a fast trip, a set of close encounters with 'this fizzing pier life.'" —Publishers Weekly

"Reading Alex Lemon’s poems is like listening in on the thoughts of one the most imaginative minds you’ve ever encountered, a mind that flits startlingly from image to image, narrative to narrative.  Here, a gang of boys bats rock-hard cupcakes through a neighbor’s windows.  Or a tattooed young man plots revenge outside a shopping mall.  Or the human heart opens in the chest like an umbrella or floats like a bread bag in a pool.  In the very best way, these poems are frenetic, vigorous, and sparkling.  But Alex Lemon writes with more than mere flash, for they are also technically sophisticated, highly intelligent and, often, deeply moving, barely concealing beneath their pyrotechnics an array of voices awash in yearning, sadness, loss, and love.  Fancy Beasts is a terrific book by one of the best younger poets at work today."  —Kevin Prufer

"Whenever I despair over the abuse of language in our culture or recoil at the non-talk and silent mutterings we Fancy Beasts pass between us as if it were digital money, I reach for a volume of poems by Alex Lemon and am refreshed in the belief that art and poetry can impart something beyond our manufactured desires and barely-concealed self-hatreds.  Life cleverly and joyfully rages in Alex Lemon's poems because everywhere in his explosive stanzas is the dry-boned conviction that we are more than a collection of lonely selves seeking aesthetic relief from the great bewilderment of existence—that occasionally that utter silence on the inside is really a dance party, operation: get down. Alex Lemon is my saint, and ever since his debut collection Mosquitoes, I've made sure to wake from the dream with his 'ashes in my mouth.'" —Major Jackson

"Once again, Alex Lemon dazzles us with his ability to slice straight through nerve and marrow on his way to the heart and mind of the matter. What I see laid bare here are our American selves, skinned and stretched into haunting souvenirs, or else 'comfortable, / Surrounded by all the crap / They bought yesterday / At Wal-Mart.' These poems will cough in your face and sing in your ear. They'll have your 'heart heaving . . . with joy,' then—if you so require—they'll 'whip [you] real good.'" —Tracy K. Smith