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A deeply imaginative collection by a beloved poet with the “ability to slice straight through nerve and marrow on his way to the heart and mind of the matter” (Tracy K. Smith).
Having extensively detailed his experience with a traumatic brain injury, Alex Lemon writes with the remarkable ability to transform the depth of pain into brilliant light. His enthralling new collection charts a visual map of the sprawling mind, translating images that alight behind the eye. It is a luminous study in contradictions: corporeal bewilderment and overwhelming apathy, the levity of dreams and the acridity of existence, aching grief and radiant joy. In turns evoking an imperative you and a collective we, our omniscient speaker is urgent and complex; he’s existential, dissociative, unable to recognize himself in photographs, and powerless in the face of the world’s crises. “I’m right here,” our speaker says. “Smack dab on planet nowhere, awaiting / The infinite ways a body can absorb / Pain.”
But in spite of its melancholia, this collection embraces the lightness and beauty that prevails. Lemon interrupts the banal imagery of the everyday with surrealist fantasia—he paints “the purpled vault of night” with “glowing eels” and visualizes “grief etched into / The air by songbirds.” These poems turn their lines into nesting dolls of images, holding “The world. In my chest.”
All Us Beautiful Monsters renders in loving, painstaking detail the complexities of life, of the earth, of humankind—in all our terror and wonder.
Praise for All Us Beautiful Monsters:
"Part exclamation point, part fist at the sky, All Us Beautiful Monsters is a storm of breathtaking music that examines the uneasy heart. Intricate and explosive, here are poems built for these chaotic times.”—Ada Limón, author of Startlement
"It took just a few lines for me to remember how much I look forward to a new book by Alex Lemon. His poems are terrified and funny and smart and honest and brokenhearted without being fully despairing. 'I sing lullabies / To myself in the dark,' he writes, and I think, yes, that’s what we all do when we are afraid. And if we are lucky we hear someone else there in the dark doing it too."—Matthew Zapruder, author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams and Story of a Poem
"For the past twenty years, Alex Lemon has been our great expressionist poet, splashing the page with assertions and images—sometimes minutely observational, sometimes wildly visionary—through which we access the speaker’s very core as he filters the sociocultural reality that surrounds him. All Us Beautiful Monsters brilliantly furthers this approach, offering a dizzying entanglement of wonder, rage, hope, terror, beauty, and delight at 'this planet of ass-slappers'—where 'the entire world wants / to be an oldster with Alzheimer’s / In a big-box store,' but where also there is 'so much / Salvageable magic' and where love can make the speaker’s chest whip 'electric like / A downed power line.'”—Wayne Miller, author of The End of Childhood
“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.”―Tracy K. Smith
“Every poem feels like an emergency, an embodiment of Frederico 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.”―Guernica
“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.”―Brenda Shaughnessy
“The great rhythmic vitality of Alex Lemon’s work is surpassed only by the pulse of his need to convey his love for the world and our place in it.”―Bob Hicok
“Alex Lemon’s imagination is dazzling and empathic. He’s a ringmaster of the highest order.”―Eduardo C. Corral
“Alex Lemon has earned the comparison to Berryman. . . . The same daring and flair for shaping popular idiom into poetry is there. He’s one of the great performers―one of the great jugglers―in the circus tent right now.”―Free Verse
“In the world of poetry, as hermetic as it is elusive, Alex Lemon . . . is already a star.”―Nick Flynn, Esquire
"Sometimes the poet seems like a descendant of Jeremiah and the speaker in Eliot's The Waste Land, a disgusted spectator of the dance of Eros and Thanatos in a contemporary culture that has become startlingly inane.... and a Swiftian proposal with its tongue tucked firmly in its cadaverous cheek.”—Kevin Nance, Poets & Writers