Make no mistake: I love Alex Lemon. If, perhaps, you have read this journal
since its inception, you will recall that he and I were the first two poets to
be featured in InDigest (and if not, you can certainly check out the back
issues). He was my professor at a small Midwestern liberal arts college, and we
are both pals with the wonderful guys who run this magazine. I learned most of
what I know from him, and most of what I didn’t learn from him I wish I’d never learned in the first place. This is a review of his second volume,
Hallelujah Blackout, and it will likely contain descriptions such as magnificent, fractured, ardent,
spatially resistant to replication on this page and seductive like a heart
drawn on a splintered windshield by lipstick held between the toes of a young
person with some sort of prominent facial asymmetry. (Crooked tooth, cleft lip,
small stone of gravel healed into the chin). I want to make it clear from the
outset that I love this guy and his book and that I know better than you do,
considering how much time I spent in awe of him and how much I respect him. I
am still going to write this review.
Hallelujah Blackout contains a diversity of poem styles rarely seen in one collection. In the same
way that someone like Terrance Hayes manages to include everything from the
traditional lyric to the hyperintellectual and difficult in one body of poetry,
Lemon’s second book begins where his first (Mosquito) left off and makes confident incursions into realms far beyond. Much of the
book is enjambed like a kaleidoscope, and sections (“Abracadaver” and “Hallelujah Blackout” especially) are splattered on the page as if a very fast bird were birthing
cliffs as it flew. Indeed, each moment is sheer and yet vaulting to the next;
almost simultaneously occur the philosophical, visceral, violent,
self-destructive, ambivalent, quotidian, alienated, gorgeous and over-blown. In
this apocalyptic wonderland engendered by “the violation of identity,” it seems simple acknowledgement is the only consolation to be had. “be shackled/ to the selves you squander” dictate the final stanzas of “underlife:” “the dirt sings/ no less than those you save.”
In my opinion, one of the book’s major victories is its ability to remain cohesive as three sections of
simpler, more narrative based poems bridge and bookend the longer, often
oblique and more demanding “Abracadaver” and “Hallelujah Blackout.” One of my favorite examples from this portion exemplifies Lemon’s ability to remain evocative and surprising without many of the pyrotechnics
that often characterize his work. “Dourine” begins:
Don’t you think it’d be cool if we hung
out? I mean, I once pulled
all of my fingernails off with my father’s pliers,
and still slivered the avocado perfectly –
you should have seen that salad. Grape
tomatoes, red cabbage – I let the cold
water run over the cucumber in the colander
until the tears on my face had dried.
I actually find the very first line to be slightly too playful and sarcastic,
though it serves its purpose in setting up expectations very different from
what is subsequently delivered. And what is delivered is one of the most superb
sequences of associative dominos I’ve ever read. The shape of a slivered avocado mimics the half moons of naked
finger tips; blood on the lettuce collects into grape tomato-colored balls; the
red and white ribbed cabbage appears like blood washing from the fingers under
cold water, and finally, the pale slices of cucumber dry into tight, salty
circles on the face. Imagine the feeling of that sensitive flesh catching on
the colander holes! It gives me goosebumps every time.
Most of the other short poems are similarly playful while adhering to the book’s dark and violent current, and if there is a weak point in Hallelujah Blackout, I think it is that a few of these probably could have been left out.
Certainly, the two longer sections, “Abracadaver” and the title poem, comprise the most compelling aspects of the volume. “Abracadaver’s” sixteen parts work in short, unpunctuated lines that burst quickly from one
image or thought to another. The narrative is erratic and resistant to any
exclusive interpretation. To me it appears as a love chronicle to both a
partner and the speaker himself beset by the narrator’s destructive narcissism, self-loathing, fears, jealousies and any other “nethery pageant/ of bones// beneath our feet -/ their thousand ways to hold/
hands in the dark.” The speaker is obsessed with cleaving, with remembrance and worry, with gifts “lovely and hopeless” and with an illicit eroticism that underscores the entire poem. In the end the
question becomes “how many times/ will I have to streak/ myself down/ your cheeks,” and we understand that there is something compelling these tears far beyond
rational desire. Or at least that’s my current take on it. My advice would be to read the poem and disagree; my
guarantee is that you won’t be disappointed or bored.
For the title poem “Hallelujah Blackout,” I issue an identical assurance of satisfaction, though I won’t spend as much time trying to twist the poem into one or two meanings. It is my
favorite part of the book and explodes into a dense barrage of taught, muscular
lines that jump from the mundane to the imaginary to a kind of incantatory
ecstasy and back again before we realize we’ve been varnishing a chair back with old underwear or simply walking a city
street as the afternoon turns to dusk. Wild syntax flips the power structure of
the universe on its ass so many times it is hard to tell who controls what and
when and how often. The second section begins:
Outside my window Brittle sticks turreting
the shingled rooftop among a clutter
Of bucking birds Boughs at the window scratching
away another of nights darkenings
The radio as loud as it goes – an old bowl of milk tramping
across the table - & this helps more
We are given an abundance of physical description enjambed heavily and shattered
by spacing, capitalization, a lack of punctuation and the occasional defiance
of reality. Alliteration tugs us along and slips us into the poem’s churning stream. This is hysteria. This is a speaker irreparably confused;
someone “On the shore’s river-pitted ruins/ where no one can be// Beautiful Suckholes & stones So beautiful// Below the citybright/ & everywhere exhaust.” The viewer is powerless as the city inhales and exhales, as the individual
turns ugly and the slurping mass turns gorgeous. I like to frame the
innumerable facets of this poem with the reality of Lemon’s brain surgery as a young man (it is alluded to explicitly at least once),
though I think that each moment stands on its own as well as it fulfills a
whole. What Lemon seems always to remember is that the reader needs at least
one finger hold to keep from dropping to oblivion. In
Hallelujah Blackout that’s about all that we get and nearly all that the speaker can provide (though he
makes innumerable efforts).
