Ecstasy is the major new collection from Alex Dimitrov whose poems such as 'The Years' and 'Someone in Paris, France is Thinking of You' in the New Yorker have gone viral.
In Ecstasy, Dimitrov explores the sensation of ecstasy in all its forms: romantic, sexual, drug-induced and spiritual. Beginning in Manhattan and finally taking us across America, London and Paris, Ecstasy is a revelatory exploration of sex, God, parties, New York, drug culture, and old school Americana.
Dimitrov is an iconographer of contemporary life, able to pin profound and timeless meaning to exact time and place, much in the way that religious imagery in churches tell of universal and placeless experience. These are poems that steal attention from their reader and hold it, with fierce and hypnotic possession.
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.
''Dimitrov is that rarest of creatures, a true poet and a truly contemporary poet. Thank god he''s here'' Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours
