Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

Fancy Beasts by Alex Lemon   
Milkweed Editions, 2010. $16

Review by Rebecca Wadlinger

Alex Lemon’s third collection of poetry Fancy Beasts delivers poems that are energetic and unblinking—his work is, once again, brimming with the bleak humor, apathy, and investigation of the material world that readers have grown to expect from his two previous collections, Mosquito and Hallelujah Blackout.

Lemon sets this new collection largely in California, taking epigraphs from a t-shirt in Santa Monica, Simone Weil, and Werner Hertzog. His speakers often become tangled up in popular culture, examining their environments in order to extract philosophical truths of the twenty-first century. For Lemon’s characters, choosing between the men’s room or the ladies’ room is sometimes an existential dilemma. But his speakers fear neither science nor extol it; they confront their human weaknesses with an extreme confidence that shocks and delights. Take, for example, the speaker of “Beautification Campaign,” who considers plastic surgery as if it were nothing more than a passing whim:

            … At the table, I fondle
            my love handles & tell the cat that I’m not afraid
            of science. Cut ‘em right off me and feed ‘em
            to the dogs. …

One especially impressive element of craft that remains constant throughout the collection is Lemon’s attention to voice. Many of his speakers have this “Oh yeah? So what!” attitude that amplifies the startling and youthful energy of his poems. I am thinking of the speaker of “Being Here,” who drops the f-bomb in the middle of a calmer, lyric poem:

            … Call me anything
           
            Before morning comes, little lover,
            Because it’s true & doesn’t fucking matter.

But this is not to say that his characters lack emotional depth, or frequently succumb to such resignation. Lemon’s voice is both true to life and multidimensional. His ability to balance humor and sass with the deep poignancy of self-realization is astounding.

The poem “Verde Vista” is one standout poem in the collection that presents readers with a speaker who is imaginatively rich and heartbreakingly human. The poem is written from the perspective of a tattooed young man who, while standing in line at the post office, is told by an old man that “Hitler would have / made a lamp out of [him].” The speaker starts to speak to the man, but quickly moves through the post office line, buys “a coil of brand-new American / Flag stamps,” and tells the man goodbye. Outside, the speaker imagines himself waiting for the old man and throwing a shopping cart through the window of his Cadillac in revenge. But when he sees the man passing by with his walker, the speaker’s imagination takes a compassionate turn. Now he imagines himself reviving his collapsed enemy and sacrificing himself for the man’s comfort. If the old man “with his fourth / Or fifth different baboon heart growling within / him” wants to stay up late reading a book, the speaker is willing to cloak his enemy’s lamp with his own skin:

            … [If the old man] tugs on
           
            The bedside lamp & is illuminated by the patchwork
            Of colors that had, years before, covered
           
            My body, well, I guess that’s fine with me, too.

Lemon’s speaker in “Verde Vista” takes readers through range of emotions, exemplifying the complex psychology that adds texture to an often ironic voice. Though readers are confronted with many unusual and violent scenes in Fancy Beasts (for example: skunks nailed to a dead man, cupcakes burned into “blackened fists,” a man giving birth to a dead dog, a pumpkin that leaks blood), the poems’ ultimate attempt to articulate redemption, salvation, and personal sacrifice add heart to the matter.

Beyond voice, Lemon’s collection shows a range of narrative and technical talents that should not go unnoticed. The center section of the book, called simply “!!”, presents about a dozen sparse poems whose one- or two-syllable lines tell of haunting narratives and unusual images. Readers admire the risks that this section takes; the result is a collection of syntactically engaging lines with a resonance that lingers. The poems tie in with the rest of the collection thematically and imagistically, as larger, self-contained poems like “More Wind” showcase similar displays of Lemon’s visual imagination:

            I watch the beautiful
            Charity of a body peeling,
           
            The heart floating
            In a bathtub for hours
           
            Before sinking to the reddy
            Bottom. …

Like the heart that is impossibly suspended for hours before it sinks, Lemon’s poems remain in readers’ minds after they set down the book and return to their daily lives. Lemon asks us to reexamine contemporary culture—to look compassionately at the world that swarms around us—and to realize that life is funny, ridiculous, tragic, and, above all, extraordinary.