Another Last Day - by Alex Lemon (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br><b>"The times have never been darker, yet Alex Lemon's imagination has never been more hopefully wild." --RICK BAROT</b><p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br>Over the course of four collections of poems, Alex Lemon has become known for his kinetic voice and sense of the dark absurd. Now this electrifying poet moves in a new direction--with a book-length sequence at once intensely vulnerable and thoroughly of our moment. <p/> Populated by visions and ghosts, <i>Another Last Day</i> follows its speaker on a search through a natural landscape turned on its edge, the landscape of today's America. In these poems, the moments of an ordinary day are rendered in raw, nearly hallucinatory detail: Ants drunk on cherry-red hummingbird nectar. An ambulance rushing into the distance. Endless rain. And, stranger: A dog carrying a hand in its mouth. An emergency room filled with moans. A place where reality and dreams merge, where "the dead refuse to be left / underground." <p/> When Lemon's speaker invites us "behind my closed eyes," it is into the vision of a speaker so plugged into the livingness of this world that he is tossed to the edge of living itself. And yet, in his poems, this openness is never just painful. "the world is a terrible place," he writes, "but I want to last forever // clinging to its teeth."<p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><b>Praise for Alex Lemon</b> <p/> "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."<b>--Tracy K. Smith</b> <p/> "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."<b>--<i>Guernica</i></b> <p/> "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."<b>--Brenda Shaughnessy</b> <p/> "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."<b>--Bob Hicok</b> <p/> "Alex Lemon's imagination is dazzling and empathic. He's a ringmaster of the highest order."<b>--Eduardo Corral</b> <p/> "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."<b>--<i>Free Verse</i></b> <p/> "In the world of poetry, as hermetic as it is elusive, Alex Lemon . . . is already a star."<b>--Nick Flynn, <i>Esquire</i></b> <p/> <b>Praise for <i>Another Last Day</i></b> <p/> Gorgeous . . . a meditation on what it means to be alive is revealed [in <i>Another Last Day</i>] by a talented and exacting poet working at the top of his game. <b>--RHINO Poetry</b> <p/> "Bertolt Brecht sardonically claimed that in dark times, too, there will be singing--there will be singing about the dark times. <i>Another Last Day</i> exemplifies that singing. In a sequence of poems that is by turns visionary and visceral, infernal and numbed, Alex Lemon describes the brokenness of our world and the self that breaks with it. Still, though the poems in this book speak from almost unbearable crisis, they are vivid to the point of ecstasy. The times have never been darker, yet Lemon's imagination has never been more hopefully wild."<b>--Rick Barot</b> <p/> "Since his first book, <i>Mosquito</i>, Alex Lemon's poems have been bloody and <i>Another Last Day</i> is no exception: 'in my guts / I feel my home // on fire / my family.' Lemon's poems are foiled, lit, intoxicating, and always busy with the beating of wings. A beautiful new book bringing us closer to the edge of the light."<b>--Beth Bachmann</b> <p/> <i>"Another Last Day</i> is haunted by the possibility of the Apocalypse. In a searing and lyrical display the speaker in this long sequence of couplets insists on interrogating what it means to be human and humane. A pall seems to engulf these landscapes and yet amidst the rubble the knowledge persists that the world is worth saving. And always, despite the detritus and the husks of burnt-out cities, the poems discover the small details that insist on what is immediately salvageable. From the wreckage of our present Alex Lemon skillfully excavates what is blessed."<b>--Oliver de la Paz</b> <p/> <i>"Another Last Day</i> is to the world what a storm is to a flower, which is to say it is a wild testament to love. Alex Lemon lavishes equal attention to the days sliced with sun and the gemmed turtles of stars inching through the nights. With his deft control of the line and sensuous description he captures the lyric moments with equal gravity--collecting litter, wishing to kiss the sick, puddles glimmering like exits, the desire to feed a dog's loyalty with one's own heart. In this book the body's fragility keeps our goodbyes at the ready, keeps us wakeful to 'each day of this life // deathmad & beautiful, ' keeps us watchful for the humming abundance of each hour."<b>--Traci Brimhall</b> <p/><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br><b>Alex Lemon</b> is the author of <i>Happy: A Memoir</i> and <i>Feverland: A Memoir in Shards</i>, and the poetry collections <i>Mosquito</i>, <i>Hallelujah Blackout</i>, <i>Fancy Beasts</i>, and <i>The Wish Book</i>. His writing has appeared in <i>Esquire</i>, <i>The Best American Poetry 2008</i>, <i>AGNI</i>, <i>Gulf Coast</i>, the <i>Kenyon Review</i>, and <i>Tin House</i>, among others. He has been awarded a Literature Fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he contributes and reviews frequently for a wide range of media outlets. He lives with his wife and two children in Fort Worth, and teaches at Texas Christian University.
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