Hallelujah Blackout

by Alex Lemon

Alex Lemon’s work defies categorization. Stark juxtaposition of images evokes the New York School, verbal collages suggest the associative method of the postmodernists, and his playful attention to sound recalls elements of Language School poetry. While these elements surface in Lemon’s work, his poetry remains profoundly original, his voice remarkably distinct. Lemon is also, like Frank O’Hara, an autobiographical poet, using the materials of life for inspiration. At 29, he is already a survivor of brain surgery. Still coping with the surgery’s effects, including a gradual loss of vision, he invokes, proclaims, decries, and serenades the world that results after the violation of identity. When the membranes that divide mind and body rupture, the result is not a void, but a strange sensory landscape where all stimuli exist on the same level. Avoiding the easy temptations of both despair and consolation, Hallelujah Blackout embraces the full range of the human experience.

Genres: Poetry

168 pages, Paperback

First published February 12, 2008

About the author

Alex Lemon's poetry collections include Hallelujah Blackout (2008 Milkweed Editions) and Mosquito (Tin House Books 2006). A memoir is also forthcoming from Scribner. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous magazines including AGNI, BOMB, Denver Quarterly Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Pleiades and Tin House. Among his awards are a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He is the co-editor of LUNA: A Journal of Poetry and Translation and is a frequent contributor to The Bloomsbury Review. He teaches in the English Department at TCU in Fort Worth, TX.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2009/02/b...

[BookBurner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes chaotic and obscure yet over-all a pleasant read. Lemon has a neat bag of tricks and some clever word choice. Definitely would recommend to an poetry lovers.

[Jon Thompson]

In his ability to express, mock and laugh at the vulnerabilities of being human in a world that can come out “carving/with Bowie knives,” the American poet who most comes to mind to me when reading Lemon is John Berryman. There are echoes of others—for example, George Oppen—but like the Berryman of the Dream Songs, Lemon distanciates pain by making it a subject for wry reflection on the indignities of physicality and the imminence of death in life. And like Berryman, Lemon’s language is often comic, acrobatic, dazzling and poignant all at once. This is most evident in the “Abracadaver” sequence and the “Hallelujah Blackout” sequence which are at the core of this collection. Many of the longer poems have a similar self-possession, wit and formal achievement (some to my eye and ear, however, don’t quite live up to the high bar set by the best poems in the collection and could’ve been culled out). That said, I think Lemon has earned the comparison to Berryman. He has yet to produce the substantial body of work that Berryman did, but the same daring and flair for shaping popular idiom into poetry is there. He’s one of the great performers—one of the great jugglers-- in the circus tent right now.

For a complete review, go toL

http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freever...

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

This work is amazing!
Some of the subject matter and content are not what I would normally gravitate to, but I can't help but return to this book~

His word choices are SO precise--I wish I could see Alex read at some point and hear these poems out loud.
I'm also fascinated by the fact that this author has survived some kind of brain injury/surgery. Some of the pieces in this work reminisce on that experience.

When I read these poems I am drawn in a way that no other work has moved me--but in a strange way. This work is dark, but simultaneously beautiful. I liken it to McCarthy's The Road, in the same sense that I am horrified, but cannot put this book down.

I was so rocked reading this before I fell asleep that I actually had to put the book back on the shelf--not on the nightstand--before I felt comfortable falling asleep.


I know that I will return to this work again, at another strange moment, a point in time which I cannot now predict.

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the verbiage of Hallelujah Blackout is lush and energetic, so much of it feels like the work of a folk artist who glues every bauble to the plywood. Within Lemon's torrent, clichés are unvictoriously reclaimed, syntax is occasionally mangled without just cause, and metaphors feel overkilled or underbaked (one egregious line likens time to a clock—is this productive?). Often, a noun won't do when it can be coupled with another, and those two nouns won't do without a few adjectives for each. If this floridity fails to float, the poems typically employ breeze-shootin' colloquialism, end-of-the-bar obscenity, and/or end-of-the-world religiosity to keep above water. Distraction is not a lofty goal. These poems, at their worst, feel arbitrary and ostentatious; at their best, they're jackhammers left on and in your hands—and in the end, none of the work sticks with as much ferocity as it's spit.

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

#2 in my Poetry Book A Day in May.

I was able to go to Alex's book launch for this one, and I knew him from being an undergraduate while he attended grad school. I won't forget him hanging in the halls, waiting for class with his leather bag slung over his shoulder--it's funny the things you remember. Here was a guy who stood in the hall a lot, the same hall, as I waited for a class too.

Either way, we've both come a long way since those days and even since his launch. I'm finding that recently I'm also coming a long way as a reader. Six years ago or so, I wouldn't have been able to manage this collection; I might have given up entirely. Now, on the other side of the editor's desk, I'm able to parse out and enjoy explosions of language and thought more. I've still got a ways to go, but Lemon's book is good for someone who wants that earnest opening of something new.

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Lemon's poetics of the ecstatic. There is a lot of sparkling and abundance in the book. I can even sense that Lemon has an arc in the book, with a speaker who first senses the incredibly bright wealth of the world, and then, as the book progresses, finds way for him to participate in all that. I do believe that arc could be more keenly felt if the book weren't 144 pages long. It seems to me the poems are participating in something so delightful, but the wonder almost feels redundant after going through so many of the poems. And, for me, wonder and redundant tend to contradict each other, and not in a way that the book intends.

[Koki · Rating 4 out of 5]

In "Hallelujah Blackout," Alex Lemon mainly writes poems about things that are encountered in every day life but using jarring imagery and defamiliarizing what readers may be used to. For example, in the poem titled "So Soon," he uses unexpected line breaks and bizarre, if not creepy, imagery: "You will wheel around the corner / into the bathroom and come / face to face with your nude self cradling / a severed Barbie head and a bucket spilling / over with slivered mango." He also employs strange similes that jut out from the poem, like "Like atomic numbers holding their thumbs out in the rain."

[Amelia Stanton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lemon's second collection, Hallelujah Blackout, continues to chronicle the poet's journey of renewal. He expresses the conflicting feelings that develop in the aftermath of his injury with a more restrained voice than that of his first collection. He is slightly more distanced from his trauma, so he is able to express his pain without being pitiable. This collection seems to focus on the waiting; Lemon is no longer fully numb, but he is not able to truly feel. He does recognize that tomorrow does offer the possibility of light, but it is clear that tomorrow is still to come.

[Gary McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

So fucking good.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

There just wasn't enough to keep me transfixed or even interested.

[Ann Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very real, a sort of commentary on the absurdity of life. Highly enjoyable!

[Bryce Emley · Rating 3 out of 5]

not as good as his first book, i don't think. i feel like i barely understood what most of them were about. so maybe it was better and i'm just a bad reader. like kate wnslet.

[Milkweed Editions]

Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist

[Jake Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read some of this in manuscript and in journals, and I can't wait to read the whole thing.