Subscribe to Read | $0.00
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Quick and Easy Sign Up!
It takes less then 1 minute to sign up, then you can enjoy Unlimited eBooks.
Read Anywhere and on Any Device!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
Alex Lemon's Mosquito both entrances and shocks the reader. This collection is an introduction to his poetic style, which is founded in personal experience. As a college athlete, Lemon suffered multiple strokes and endured invasive neurosurgery. These poems chronicle his reconstructive journey, a painful process of repair, growth, and renewal. Lemon channels his utter inability to speak about or process the agony he has endured, and the physicality of poetry seems to conquer his speechlessness.
Not in my top books, but worth reading. Lemon's perspective is really interesting, and the ways in which he incorporates his experience with brain cancer into his poems is fascinating.
When it was good it was great but when it was bad it was awful. If u ever read this book. I say only read part 3.
Here is my review: http://booksandbowelmovements.wordpre...
Incredible book. I'm super thankful to Adam Clay for turning me on to Lemon's work.A mixture of William Matthews, Larry Levis, and, more contemporarily, Nick Flynn, Lemon's book offers brilliant lyrics and touching narratives. His poems are never flat, never predictable, never cliche, and never less than astonishing.I can't recommend this book enough. If you like raw, honest, brilliantly nuanced poetry, Lemon's work is for you.I love the whole book, but section 3 was particularly mind-blowing. I...
One of those rare poets whom I don't quite understand yet find thrilling. I keep picking up this book and reading a poem or two for the nervy language that skips along on pain and ecstasy.
You want evidence of the streetfight? A gutter-grate bruise & concrete scabs—here are nails on the tongue,a mosaic of glass shards on my lips.I am midnight banging against housefire.A naked woman shakingwith the sweat of need.An ocean of burning diamondsbeneath my roadkill,my hitchhikerbelly fills sweet. I am neon blind & kisstoo black. Dangle stars—let me sleep hoarse-throated in the desertunder a blanket sewn from spiders.Let me be delicate & invisible.Kick my ribs, tug my hair.Scream You’re G...
I was really excited to read this book, which was billed as the sort of poetic accompaniment to Lemon's memoir about his brain surgery. Unfortunately, I wasn't that impressed. Lemon's poems generally fall under a couple of umbrellas: the macho-man-meat-hooks-look-at-this-fist-in-your-face-bodies-bodies-bodies-uncontrollably-exhuberant sort of poetry (akin to Richard Siken) and the look-how-fucked-up-my-family-is sort of poetry (akin to Nick Flynn). I am not a huge fan of either of these poetic m...
This is a book that has a permanent home on my nightstand. I just read it for the third time and with each reading I gain new insight. The perfect---absolute perfect---balance of lyric and narrative. I can't get enough.
In her poem “Poetry,” Marianne Moore claims that until poets “can be ‘literalists of the imagination’” we won’t have actually achieved the proverbial “it” of poetry. And though contemporary poetry obviously isn’t a direct response to Moore’s suggestion, within the scope of poetry written in the past fifty years there’s an implication of a response, a need to tighten narrative while expanding its scope, and in doing so bringing to life the words we cherish on our pages. Certainly the number of sc...
Alex Lemon lives between language and life and gives them both their due.
I feel like I should reread this book so I'm sure it gets a fair shake. There were some lovely lyrical moments and interesting verb choices, but after reading it, it felt sort of like the gastronomic equivalent of having eaten a beautiful blown-sugar ornament. And nothing in it really lasted with me. Still, there's beauty in here.
The Portrait My Mother Painted from My Mug Shot "She made pitch & range with pigment& brushstroke. Face without swelling, eyes nothing but blue. She squeezed melody from my bruises. Hold the mug shot next to the frame & I look like I fathered myself." Often hard to speak about favorites. Mosquito is like watching a dissection of pain and pleasure with a word-scapel. It's raw and adulterated and I love it simply because I live in that kind of mud (figuratively, duh). Easily, easily my favorite
This book can be a little dense -- you have to wade through some of it, but Lemon's powerful language cut through you and leave your mouth puckering. This book tells the story of Lemon's brain surgery, an intense and raw collection of poems.
In "Mosquito," the poet creates a sense of suffering and pain without being overt. He uses jarring line breaks, adding to the unpredictability of the poems, and makes many references to surgical tools, often referring to them as something cold. He also employs several interesting and often ironic-sounding similes that seem to have been drawn from our normal every day experience, such as "Like Blackouts, I have perfect timing."
it's like being swarmed with the prettiest bees, and for a second being able to notice how lovely they are, their glass beads and needles, and million wings thrumming, and the smell of all that pollen in all their knee pockets, and all their spit, and all of that. then it's like feeling them sting you a million times. and it's worth it "&the sparks".
Blitz me anytime.
I enjoyed Alex Lemon's Mosquito: Poems. His book deals a lot with illness, whether it is his own or his grandfather's. Even the love poems in this book have a bit of sickness in them. The poems feel like they are more alive in a way because the speaker in the poems doesn't take life for granted.I think this book is something everyone can relate to because we all have or will have to deal with serious illness. It is authentic in the way it portrays a life trying to be normal and day to day while
Many of the poems seemed immature to me. My feeling about this collection is very lukewarm.
