Alex Dimitrov’s third book, Love and Other Poems, is full of praise for the world we live in. Taking time as an overarching structure―specifically, the twelve months of the year―Dimitrov elevates the everyday, and speaks directly to the reader as if the poem were a phone call or a text message. From the personal to the cosmos, the moon to New York City, the speaker is convinced that love is “our best invention.” Dimitrov doesn’t resist joy, even in despair. These poems are curious about who we are as people and shamelessly interested in hope.
ISBN: 9781556595998
Format: Paperback
Reviews
“An epic ode to the people, places and things that strike Dimitrov’s fancy. “Love and Other Poems” is the perfect read for anyone who feels in love with this astonishing world — or needs that love rekindled.” — Columbia Daily Tribune
“A highly pleasurable, heavily Frank O’Hara–influenced collection in love with moments and New York City and the aesthetics of cyclical ephemerality (see “November”: “Is the first snow just snow./It feels like more”), full of exuberance and wistfulness, longing and joy.”—The New York Times
“[Love and Other Poems] practically embodies the phrase ‘breath of fresh air.’… It fizzes like a just-opened bottle of soda. It sprints like the Beatles running through a train station. It talks a mile a minute like a person swept away in the druggy lunacy of a serious crush… Love and Other Poems has felt like a long-awaited remedy.”—The New York Times
“Full of fierce astonishment, Dimitrov’s wide-eyed collection asks us as humans—’Some brutes who screamed / for everything to look at us’—to take a moment and gaze back out at the world. Because “to be queer / is a way to forgive life,’ what we might find there is comfort and pleasure: ‘I love opening a window in a room/ I love the feeling of possibility by the end of the first cup of / coffee.’ Written with the winking intimacy of a Twitter DM, these poems suggest that even aloneness can be a shared experience.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
“If hope were an object, it would be poet Alex Dimitrov’s new book Love and Other Poems... And as the poems travel through time, the poet’s vulnerability and loneliness are palpable enough to, perhaps deliberately, make the reader feel less alone.” —NPR
“Joyous and captivating… Meditations on humanity’s search for meaning are handled with wit and vulnerability… In this affecting collection, his most fully achieved thus far, Dimitrov provides the reader with a needed celebration of pleasures.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“By pushing beyond the barriers of the traditional poem, Dimitrov has not only crafted an original type of love poem for our new age; but he’s also allowed his writing process to include an epistolary exchange with readers.” —Library Journal
“Clever, casual, and inviting… This is a book about love, yes, but it is also one of the best recent books about New York City. If you love that city, if you hate that city, if you want to understand that city: read this book.”—The Millions
“…A remarkable study in hope at a time when hope might be in short supply… Anyone would want to befriend this alternately hilarious and heartbreaking speaker…” —The Arkansas International
“Love and Other Poems offers a perfect antidote to our fraught times with its hungry embrace of life.”—Library Journal
“…Dimitrov writes poems shaped by a cosmopolitan air of hip self-awareness. His third collection delivers candid snapshots of life for a gay thirtysomething in his city: good long cries in Washington Park, quick trips to the corner bodega to buy blueberries and cigarettes, writing poems in a cab at 3:00 am.” —Booklist
“Here in his third volume Dimitrov comes across as an unabashed romantic. The book revives the persona of the downtown flâneur — it’s full of nods to New York landmarks — and reading it feels like wandering around the pre-pandemic metropolis we ache to get back to.” —The New York Times
“This is a collection of romantic and dramatic poetry and lovely moments that can be opened and read at any time of the night or day. Rich, layered, and meaningful, every poem is a moment of reflection that’s worth having.” —BizNews
“The poetry of Alex Dimitrov stays in the present. It’s the essence of contemporary. A living voice, an urbane voice, overstimulated and sweet and stylish and aware. . . . [It] is casual, open aesthete, open-hearted in a way that doesn’t forgo acid worldliness. No one could call his lines naïve, and yet they record—almost can’t help themselves—moments of awe, happiness, painful clarity, or, the beauty of true feeling, up or down. In that sense, Dimitrov is a first-class artist of the art of feeling, of giving a mood a shape in language. And here is a poet who understands the stakes of that, infuses his art with that understanding, whose art-for-art’s-sake is built not on an evasion or denial of the harsh everyday politics of the world, but in a rebuke to its dominion over things, a revenge on it, a claiming of what’s vibrant in the moments of our lives.”—McSweeney’s
As featured in:
O, The Oprah Magazine‘s “32 LGBTQ Books That Will Change the Literary Landscape in 2021”
O, The Oprah Magazine‘s “20 of the Best Books of February 2021 to Fall in Love With”
The New York Times, “10 New Books We Recommend This Week”
Lambda Literary, “February’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books”
Library Journal, “Books and Authors to Know: Poetry Titles to Watch 2021”
