Fancy Beasts

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 dealing with toxic content—including the turning point in a life of abuse, in which the recovering victim/perpetrator puzzles through the paradigm of son-to-husband-to-father—Lemon’s point of view is always genuine and trustworthy.

A frank, funny, and inimitably frenetic vision of post-millennial America, Fancy Beasts is a stunning achievement from Alex Lemon.

Full of raw energy, up-to-date in its slang and its jump cuts, effervescent with the playfulness and sometimes the angers of youth, the third collection from Lemon (Hallelujah Blackout) conveys a likable, outsized personality; it should also work well in tandem with the Texas-based poet's forthcoming memoir, Happy (Scribner, 2010), which describes his fast descent and striking recovery, as a young adult, from shocking and sudden brain injury. Saying yes to everything/ Does not mean you need// To grunt at each person/ Who says hello: so begins a poem called We Could Boom Boom, sounding at once a joke and a warning. Let me be your guiding fright, your/ Highway to the comfort zone, another poem requests; around that invitation Lemon arranges both a love poem and a depiction of suicide. Champions will praise the verve that lets the poet imagine himself In the presence/ Of dynamite./ Deserving of/ Everything. The strikingly terse sequence entitled only !! makes a welcome, if sometimes frightening, change of pace. It also alludes, apparently, to his brain injury: The fun park inside (that is, inside his skull) Is being/ Renovated.// Bellwether./ Blackened eyes. But such gravities are exceptions: delights, and shocks, are the rule. Like Tony Hoagland, Lemon is often self-conscious about the volatilities his poems convey, about their almost giddy tonalities, but he will not apologize for himself: adult life is a scary gift, a fast trip, a set of close encounters with this fizzing pier life. (Mar.)
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