Mosquito: Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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 journey through serious illness and his emergence into a world where eroticism, hope, and wisdom allow him to see life in a wholly new way. Mosquito is a resilient meditation that is as much Zen as it is explosive, as clinical as it is philosophical and lyrical.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this edgy, energetic, even frenetic debut from a rising star of the Midwest, Lemon's jagged, commanding voice both charms and shocks: "Voice, be amazing/ circling the river bottom," his leadoff poem instructs. The first section (of four) stuns with accessible yet intense language, and also with the events it appears to describe: brain surgery and the poet's slow recovery from it. "Tomorrow my head opens," he says; "If I am still/ here, someone let me know what I am." Subsequent poems steer clear of medical topics in favor of sparkling, slightly diffuse cascades of images: "It is the year of the dismembered horse/ Bury me with bones instead of eyes." Crackling extremes court melodrama knowingly, challenging readers to say when enough is enough. Lemon's rawness and intelligence have a fine, in-your-face excess. Physical violence "chipped-teeth," "kicked-heart,/ dried blood" recurs as experience and symbol, as do a series of crime novel and film noir backdrops: "always, I'm decapitated," Lemon claims, "& feel as though someone is tracing/ The zippers of my self-inflicted bites." Above all, these poems make strong impressions, using their verbal surprises as confrontational flirtations, or else tiny explosives.