The Wish Book

"Human dynamo: you must/ Have a good time," Lemon (Fancy Beasts) exhorts in his explosive fourth collection of verse; his agitated, discombobulated alter egos both shock and entertain. Lemon's exclamations, free associations, and volatile images showcase extreme highs and lows as well as constant attraction to the wild life, or to the wildly inappropriate: "It's hard to imagine a day/ when I'm not scratching/ My nuts right at God." But Lemon is no light comedian: his party persona, extroversion, and fragmentary style all look like defenses against Lemon's mortal fears. Those fears, in turn, speak to the medical history%E2%80%94brain surgery, tough recovery%E2%80%94detailed in his 2010 memoir, Happy. In a poem that reads like a nightmare about his hospital stay, "It felt/ Like a vibrating halo had been screwed/ Into my head... a double-decker toy racetrack/ Had been drilled into my skull." Lemon may disorient, or exhaust, readers who want poems with more coherence; his speakers do not develop or change very much, neither within the poems, nor between them. Yet Lemon's enthusiasms, with their "hip tosses & heavy metal"%E2%80%94part sarcastic, part macho, part tender, and always extreme%E2%80%94have found, and deserve to find, serious sympathies. (Apr.)