Ecstasy

Alex Dimitrov

$29.00

Adding to cart… The item has been added
Author
Alex Dimitrov
Publish Date
2025-04-01
Book Type
Hardcover
Publisher Name
Knopf
Subtitle
Poems
Number of Pages
116
ISBN-10
0593802926
ISBN-13
9780593802922
SKU
9780593802922

Description

A fearless, revelatory collection from one of the most talked-about poets in America, whose poems have been embraced by critics and readers alike as candid, intimate, and magnetically charged (“like catching a glimpse of the full moon in the middle of the day” —Bomb)

Alex Dimitrov embraces a life on the edge in New York and the finely wrought poetry that can come out of it as he explores sex, drugs, parties, pleasure, and God in the 2020s, and looks back to a coming-of-age in the 1990s that still informs who his generation is and will be. His unabashed and drivingly musical poems are a call against repression, a rebuke of cultural norms and shame, and a celebration of human authenticity—even if to live under such philosophies is dangerous. In “Today I Love Being Alive,” we find the poet naked in his kitchen, eating a banana and obsessed with a new lover, declaring “I don't care about being remembered. / I care about . . . Strong men. Beautiful sentences. Italian leather;” in “Poppers," he stands lightheaded in the bathroom at a bar, “thinking of what to do / with the rest of my life,” and issuing a warning to himself and us: “Poetry / is not a self-help book.”

Dimitrov is an iconographer of contemporary life, able to pin profound and timeless meaning to a fleeting encounter in the street. Ecstasy also engages with the poet’s Christian upbringing, interrogating faith as both an enemy and valve of catharsis, and a bedfellow of what this book celebrates and courts: profound human ecstasy.