The Wish Book

September 29, 2014
"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 historyâbrain surgery, tough recoveryâdetailed 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"âpart sarcastic, part macho, part tender, and always extremeâhave found, and deserve to find, serious sympathies.

April 15, 2014
Although I'm not much of one myself, I've always had a soft spot for talkers. It's ironic that some of the biggest talkers are also given to solitude, with their desire to unburden themselves a reflection of a life spent mostly alone and in silence. Lemon ("Fancy Beasts") is a poet who jam-packs his work with living speech that embraces the globalized world's curious mixture of physical and virtual particulars. His latest volume demonstrates some of the electric loneliness that permeates the repertoire of big talkers, but the voice that propels it is intelligent and self-deprecating, both angry at the world and in love with it, too. Lemon's landscape allows for no passive objects: all possess emotional agency and glow with its potential. But exuberant speech is constantly in danger of becoming a monolog, an exercise in self-regard that threatens to exclude the audience altogether. While the poems here largely avoid that pratfall, it will be interesting to see how Lemon negotiates this issue going forward. VERDICT A lyrical book with plenty of jagged virtuosity; for those who like theater with their poetry.--Chris Pusateri, Jefferson Cty. P.L., Lakewood, CO

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2014
The author of three previous books of poetry, including Fancy Beasts (2010), Lemon shines in his new collection, composed of tightly coiled, fast-paced lines and persistently unexpected images, such as jellyfish stuffed to bursting with diamonds, or flames shooting from kitchen faucets. In freewheeling sequences of seeming non sequiturs, Lemon blends the energy of a carnival barker with the precise prosody of a master craftsman, creating a literary Tilt-a-Whirl of touch-and-go emotions. Poems jump from arresting images of physical heartbreak (Heart cords ecstatically / torn apart like Twizzlers) to unbearable, agonizing grief (Your insides / Can't stop caterwauling). A wordsmith of invented verbs and odd adjectives (Afternoon sunlight / Hammocks through / The rainladen / Lilacs), Lemon proves a unique and lively vocalist, compelled by the same ominous urgency that inspired the ancient haruspex (a prophetic figure Lemon co-opts for one of the book's most tantalizing titles). Also the author of Happy (2009), a memoir that chronicles his diagnosis with brain hemorrhaging and subsequent, life-saving surgery, Lemon has been likened to Lucia Perillo, Ariana Reines, and Laura Kasischke.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)