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Alex Dimitrov is the author of Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), Begging for It (Four Way Books, 2013), and the online chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, Tin House, Boston Review, and the American Poetry Review. He is the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets where he edits the popular online series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine. He has taught creative writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Marymount Manhattan College, Bennington College, and lives in New York City.
Together and By Ourselves
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ISBN-13:
9781619321694
- Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
- Publication date: 04/11/2017
- Sold by: Barnes & Noble
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 96
- File size: 657 KB
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“Dimitrov is a vital new energy in American poetry.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Truth-telling, raw, fierce with feeling.”—Brenda Shaughnessy
“Dimitrov can sound at once hip and naive, devoted to the sincerities that other sorts of poets reject or obscure.”—Publishers Weekly
Together and by Ourselves, Alex Dimitrov’s second book of poems, takes on broad existential questions and the reality of our current moment: being seemingly connected to one another, yet emotionally alone. Through a collage aesthetic and a multiplicity of voices, these poems take us from coast to coast, New York to LA, and toward uneasy questions about intimacy, love, death, and the human spirit. Dimitrov critiques America’s long-lasting obsessions with money, celebrity, and escapism—whether in our personal, professional, or family lives. What defines a life? Is love ever enough? Who are we when together and who are we by ourselves? These questions echo throughout the poems, which resist easy answers. The voice is both heartfelt and skeptical, bruised yet playful, and always deeply introspective.
from "Water"
What is aging exactly?
There are new jobs and people
and someone dies before noon every day.
I am swimming and swimming…in May or an ocean,
I don’t see the reason. “But that’s unimportant,” you said.
“Just keep doing it over again until one day you can’t.”
Spring excites us and we know what it is every time.
The minutes in meetings are life’s most undistinguished;
that’s obvious. And what’s obvious makes us all fools
then fast friends.
Alex Dimitrov is the author of Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), Begging for It (Four Way Books, 2013), and the online chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, Tin House, Boston Review, and the American Poetry Review. He is the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets where he edits the popular online series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine. He has taught creative writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Marymount Manhattan College, Bennington College, and lives in New York City.
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Publishers Weekly
03/27/2017In his second collection, Dimitrov (Begging for It) negotiates the cosmopolitan as well as the cosmos through a psychopomp narrator, guiding readers—living souls—through parties and canyons and cities. The figure is reminiscent of Emerson’s transparent eyeball cruising through a cityscape or O’Hara’s observation of the world moving by: “And people walked out of churches and bars,/ cafés and apartments, cities, towns, photographs,/ someone’s Friday night party,/ someone they once knew or slept with.” Dimitrov roves through four billion years of the sun’s existence and into calendars that contain a secret 13th month. His voice is steady across poems, swiftly navigating a dizzying landscape of non sequiturs and litanies and passing faces. Many of the poems are marked by absence: “Yesterday there was nothing on the beach/ and no one knows where it came from.” The narrator’s longing inside this lack is often matched by the distance the reader feels from all these passing scenes, like being told about a memorable photograph without being permitted to look at it. In these moments the book glows. Dimitrov instills palpable emotional yearning in his readers, as if you’re a tourist inside your own life: “A little of our misplaced lives,/ we saw them waving on the roof in the dark/ and thought they were birds.” (Apr.)
Library Journal
04/15/2017The absence of salutations aside, Dimitrov's second collection (after Begging for It) is a series of intimate, unsent missives to an irretrievable lost love, a one-sided correspondence in which brief, fragmentary recollections of the beloved trigger a loosely woven philosophical discourse on enigmatic questions of identity and self-worth ("Is it lucky to live or embarrassing?"). Seemingly assembled one end-stopped line at a time, the collection is a series of halting, quasi stream-of-consciousness monologs ("White nothing: someone should be happy for you./ The main dish, I admit, was a little bit bloody./ That year he shortened his hair many days"), often complicated by contradiction ("The best reason to live is that there is no reason to live") and aporia ("and now that I'm happy—now what?"). The poet's existential angst is thick and unrelenting, and the world he inhabits, a ghostly, immaterial Manhattan, remains unknowable, untouchable. VERDICT Notwithstanding an occasionally apt line ("It's difficult to see the world from the world") or odd moment of self-consciousness ("This is the nineteenth line of the poem"), Dimitrov's flat diction, indifferent prosody, and unwavering tone of sober introspection grow monotonous and claustrophobic over the length of the book, diluting its emotional urgency.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY