Fancy Beasts
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.)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.