Ecstasy

<p><b>In <i>Ecstasy</i>, Alex Dimitrov embraces a life on the edge in New York and the finely wrought poetry that can come out of it.</b><br><br>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.<br><br>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.’<br><br>Dimitrov is an iconographer of contemporary life, able to pin profound and timeless meaning to a fleeting encounter in the street. <i>Ecstasy </i>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.<br><br><b>''Dimitrov is that rarest of creatures, a true poet and a truly contemporary poet. Thank god he''s here'' Michael Cunningham, author of <i>The Hours</i></b></p>