Ecstasy

(Hardback)

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A fearless, revelatory collection from one of the most talked-about poets in America- intimate, heartbreaking and true At the end of ecstasy / only the memory of ecstasy. / The tongue. The chorus. / The streets of flesh. In Ecstasy, Alex Dimitrov embraces a life on the edge in New York and the finely wrought poetry that can come out of it. He explores sex, drugs, parties, pleasure, and God in the 2020s, and looks back to a coming-of-age in the 1990s that still informs who his generation is and will be. His unabashed and drivingly musical poems are a call against repression, a rebuke of cultural norms and shame, and a celebration of human authenticity - even if to live under such philosophies is dangerous. In 'Today I Love Being Alive', we find the poet naked in his kitchen, eating a banana and obsessed with a new lover, declaring 'I don't care about being remembered. / I care about . . . Strong men. Beautiful sentences. Italian leather'; in 'Poppers', he stands lightheaded in the bathroom at a bar, 'thinking of what to do / with the rest of my life', and issuing a warning to himself and us- 'Poetry / is not a self-help book.' Dimitrov is an iconographer of contemporary life, able to pin profound and timeless meaning to a fleeting encounter in the street. Ecstasy also engages with the poet's Christian upbringing, interrogating faith as both an enemy and valve of catharsis, and a bedfellow of what this book celebrates and courts- profound human ecstasy. 'Ready to fuck or to love, to shine and to commiserate. This is the feeling of reading the poems in Ecstasy' Adam Zmith, author of Deep Sniff

Reviews

I'm singing badly and a little frazzled from all the dancing, or maybe the boy whose eyes didn't meet mine. I'm stomping down a rain-soaked street in the middle of the night. I'm supposed to be going home but I'm fired up now. Ready to fuck or to love, to shine and to commiserate. This is the feeling of reading the poems in Ecstasy. Alex is wholly responsible for this cacophony of emotions and bodily experiences. Thank you, Alex. You remind me why I live -- Adam Zmith
Dimitrov is that rarest of creatures, a true poet and a truly contemporary poet. Thank god hes here * Michael Cunningham *

Author Bio

Alex Dimitrov is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize and is the author of Begging For It (2013), Together And By Yourselves (2017), and Love and Other Poems (2021). His work has been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, Poetry, and more. Formerly, he was the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets where he edited the popular online series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine. From 2009-2013, he founded and ran Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York. Currently, he teaches creative writing at NYU where he is Writer in Residence.