You/ should have seen the sweat of still-being-alive,” writes Lemon in his sprawling, varied, and ambitious second collection. Thoughts of joy and pain, eros and death, not to mention references from Van Gogh to “half-scratched lotto tickets” collide in these unclassifiable, rapid-fire poems. Lemon (Mosquito)
constantly asks the reader to take his complex ecstasies in one swallow, diction and image madly comingled: “Alleluia, asshole, amen./ “Together: let us eat.” Elsewhere, “a car wreck/ In my hands,” is followed by a plea to “Come with me tonight, my chocolate-/smelling love” At times the fever pitch of these poems is diminished through repetition, but the book’s two long poems—“Abracadaver” and the title piece—provide a counterpoint to Lemon’s freewheeling antics: a softer, more stripped-down voice amid the rush “in the matchbook of our heads.” (Apr.)
