In its unabashed celebration of love and the hungry embrace of life, Love and Other Poems is the perfect tonic for our fraught times: it will make you feel less alone.
So this is love. When it slows
the rain touches everyone on their way home.
Whatever was promised of pleasure
costs the body more than it has.
Perhaps they were right putting love into books...
to look at the sky without asking a question,
to look at the sea and know you won't drown today.
Despite all our work, even the worst of life
has a place in memory. And the fixed hours
between two and five before evening
are the aimless future with someone
who cannot stay new.
Love and Other Poems is full of praise for the world we live in. Taking time as an overarching structure - specifically, the twelve months of the year - Alex Dimitrov elevates the everyday and speaks directly to the reader. From the personal to the cosmos, the moon to New York City, the speaker is convinced that love is 'our best invention'. Dimitrov doesn't resist joy, even in despair. These poems are curious about who we are as people and shamelessly interested in hope.
'[Love and Other Poems] practically embodies the phrase "breath of fresh air" . . . It fizzes like a just-opened bottle of soda. It sprints like the Beatles running through a train station. It talks a mile a minute like a person swept away in the druggy lunacy of a serious crush . . . Love and Other Poems has felt like a long-awaited remedy' The New York Times
'Full of fierce astonishment' O, The Oprah Magazine
'If hope were an object, it would be poet Alex Dimitrov's new book Love and Other Poems' NPR
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A highly pleasurable, heavily Frank O'Hara-influenced
collection in love with moments and New York City and the aesthetics of cyclical ephemerality, full of exuberance and wistfulness, longing and joy'