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.Populated by visions and ghosts, Another Last Day 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...

"To read this book is to meet a man who would climb the sky." —BOB HICOKIn 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. ...

"Alex Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity."—Mark DotyBrain surgery. Assault weapons in the bed of a pickup truck. Sophia Loren at the Oscars. Rilke, Rodin, and the craters of the moon. Recovery and disintegration. Monkeys stealing an egg outside a temple in Kathmandu. Brushing teeth bloody on long car rides under blue skies. Pain, ours and what we bring to others. Wildfires in southern Californi...

"Dark narratives about femininity . . . Reddy channels the vibe and energy of Plath and Sexton, but it's her arresting language that's the real draw here." — Publishers WeeklyDouble Jinx follows the multiple transformations—both figurative and literal—that accompany adolescence and adulthood, particularly for young women. Drawing inspiration from sources as varied as Ovid's Metamorphoses, the rewritten fairy tales in Anne Sexton's Tra...

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....

California wildfires, the 2008 election, plastic surgery, Larry Craig, wildfires, Wal-Mart, and rampant commercialism—in Fancy Beasts, Alex Lemon takes on American media culture, the obscene foil for personal legacies of violence and violation.The poems of this collection are a workout: vigorous and raw, frenetic and fearless. Yet they are also composed and controlled, pared down and sculpted, with a disarming narrative simplicity and directness. Even when...

Lyrical and explosive, this debut book of poetry explores a young man's experiences as a brain surgery patient, plumbs the depths of our greatest fears: death, pain, and illness, and emerges to find eroticism, wild new hope, and the wisdom to see the world in a wholly new way.Lyrical and explosive, this debut book of poetry explores Alex Lemon’s experiences as a brain surgery patient. Mosquito blends autobiography and poetry, bearing witness to a young man’s journe...

His freshman year of college, Alex Lemon was supposed to be the star catcher on the Macalester College baseball team. He was the boy getting every girl, the hard-partying kid everyone called Happy. In the spring of 1997, he had his first stroke. For two years Lemon coped with his deteriorating health by sinking deeper into alcohol and drug abuse. His charming and carefree exterior masked his self-destructive and sometimes cruel behavior as he endured two more brain bleeds ...

Critically acclaimed poet Alex "Happy" Lemon takes listeners on a journey of addiction, tragedy, and survival in this memoir. With an aneurysm in his brain, Lemon becomes trapped within the wreckage of his 19-year-old, stroke-ravaged body. But as he plunges into depression and longs for death, his mom's life-affirming determination urges him to talk and walk and live again.