All Us Beautiful Monsters

A deeply imaginative collection by a beloved poet with the “ability to slice straight through nerve and marrow on his way to the heart and mind of the matter” (Tracy K. Smith). Having extensively detailed his experience with a traumatic brain injury, Alex Lemon writes with the remarkable ability to transform the depth of pain into brilliant light. His enthralling new collection charts a visual map of the sprawling mind, translating images that alight behind the eye. It is a luminous study in contradictions: corporeal bewilderment and overwhelming apathy, the levity of dreams and the acridity of existence, aching grief and radiant joy. In turns evoking an imperative you and a collective we, our omniscient speaker is urgent and complex; he’s existential, dissociative, unable to recognize himself in photographs, and powerless in the face of the world’s crises. “I’m right here,” our speaker says. “Smack dab on planet nowhere, awaiting / The infinite ways a body can absorb / Pain.” But in spite of its melancholia, this collection embraces the lightness and beauty that prevails. Lemon interrupts the banal imagery of the everyday with surrealist fantasia—he paints “the purpled vault of night” with “glowing eels” and visualizes “grief etched into / The air by songbirds.” These poems turn their lines into nesting dolls of images, holding “The world. In my chest.” All Us Beautiful Monsters renders in loving, painstaking detail the complexities of life, of the earth, of humankind—in all our terror and wonder.