The Wish Book

"To read this book is to meet a man who would climb the sky." —BOB HICOK In 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. These poems are full of frenetic energy and images pleasantly, strangely colliding: jigsaws and bathtubs and kung-fu and X-rays. A carnival barker calls. A jellyfish celebrates a shaky adulthood. A sliding door shatters with the passing through of a body. And a heart is "ecstatically / Torn apart like Twizzlers." Lean and muscular,  The Wish Book is a collection of fireworks and wild emotion, defined by Lemon's distinct brand of poetic edginess.