Together and By Ourselves

by Alex Dimitrov

“Dimitrov is a vital new energy in American poetry.”— Los Angeles Review of Books “Truth-telling, raw, fierce with feeling.”— Brenda Shaughnessy “Dimitrov can sound at once hip and naive, devoted to the sincerities that other sorts of poets reject or obscure.”— Publishers Weekly Together and by Ourselves, Alex Dimitrov’s second book of poems, takes on broad existential questions and the reality of our current being seemingly connected to one another, yet emotionally alone. Through a collage aesthetic and a multiplicity of voices, these poems take us from coast to coast, New York to LA, and toward uneasy questions about intimacy, love, death, and the human spirit. Dimitrov critiques America’s long-lasting obsessions with money, celebrity, and escapism—whether in our personal, professional, or family lives. What defines a life? Is love ever enough? Who are we when together and who are we by ourselves? These questions echo throughout the poems, which resist easy answers. The voice is both heartfelt and skeptical, bruised yet playful, and always deeply introspective. from "Water" What is aging exactly?
There are new jobs and people
and someone dies before noon every day.
I am swimming and swimming…in May or an ocean,
I don’t see the reason. “But that’s unimportant,” you said.
“Just keep doing it over again until one day you can’t.”
Spring excites us and we know what it is every time.
The minutes in meetings are life’s most undistinguished;
that’s obvious. And what’s obvious makes us all fools
then fast friends.

Alex Dimitrov is the author of Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), Begging for It (Four Way Books, 2013), and the online chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, Tin House, Boston Review, and the American Poetry Review. He is the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets where he edits the popular online series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine. He has taught creative writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Marymount Manhattan College, Bennington College, and lives in New York City.

Genres: Poetry, LGBT, Queer, 21st Century

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 4, 2017

About the author

Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, including Love and Other Poems, as well as the chapbook American Boys. His work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Poetry. He was the former senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited Poem-A-Day and American Poets. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and Barnard College, among other institutions. With Dorothea Lasky, he is the co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac. Dimitrov lives in New York.

Reviews

[Ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are beautiful poems--I loved them so much I had to buy the book. Almost surrealistic, vaguely reminiscent of Ashbery's evocative poems, they include pop culture, references to other poets' work but are mostly the product of the poet's own struggles. The poetry spoke to my own ambivalence: the need to be alone, the need to be with others, the difficulties of both but the imperative that both needs be filled. Relationships end, we are ourselves capable of doing terrible things but there is still a beauty in our souls and in our relationships, in our desires, in our failed love.

Dimitrov uses an interesting endstopped line, often two sentences within one line. It made for an unusual rhythm that highlighted and expanded the meaning of the poems.

Both in form and in content, Dimitrov is a powerful poet. His poems satisfy both the head (the intellectual aspect of ourselves) and the heart.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poet with a deep voice.
Book Review for Together and by Ourselves by Alex Dimitrov

5 starts out of 5

What I like most about Alex Dimitrov’s poetry book, Together and by Ourselves, is the simple yet brilliant one liners amidst the narrative poems. First of all, I am a big fan of full length poetry books that contain long poems. Here, I am not ever disappointed. Each poem will take the reader into a world that inhabits poetry, the world of outward circumstances meeting the inner workings of the mind.

This poetry book is divided into five sections. In the first part there are poems that reach deep into the psyche of human motivation and relationships. In the poem, “Champagne,” there is a line that stand out for me, “Believe me, he said, every hand finds the right door without keys.” The poem continues in this manner of interrupting your thoughts once you grasp his meaning, then we jump to actions and sequence of events that makes the poet question and answer existential questions. Dimitrov is a poet that does not stop questioning.

Most of the poems fit precisely on one page, this book is wider than traditional poetry books, to enable the reader to feel the full effect of each sentence. I love the formatting and presentation of each poem. I enjoy the visual, artistic cover of a girl hanging from a door frame, her feet not touching the ground, she could be interpreted as some kind of muse or a human wall in front of a door. I connect with the girl instantly, and perhaps feel a kindred connection to her as I, myself, have felt that disassociation from society and people as if I was floating in space, yet at the same time, in a home, together among objects and people. You can probably write a whole article on the cover alone.

The second part of the poetry book takes us to Los Angeles and the power and the glory of stardom, dreams, illusions and the human condition. On of my favourite poems is in this section, “Jesus in Hollywood,” and the brilliant poem, “American Money.”

“If you die enough times, you become your own saint.” This line is taken from the poem, “Speeding down PCH.” As a true poet’s poet, Alex Dimitrov, reflects on nature and life with hard facts. His unique poetic voice captures your attention and requires the reader to stop, pause and reflect or regret on the philosophy behind his poetry.

The rest of the book I enjoyed on a slower pace. Reading a few poems every day up until the final one, which was epic in its masterpiece way of combining human frailty and emotions.

This is a poetry book to have and to cherish like a marriage of true minds.

I have selected a few pieces but nothing could give this book justice, besides holding it in your hands, and reading a true poet’s mind.

[emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘J’ai plus de souvenirs que si j’avais mille ans’

It has a poem written after a Nirvana song ('All Apologies') that I like, and that itself is enough to make me want to give it a 4. But I don't know, I'll leave it as a 3 for now just because of a lack of 'resonance'.

(from ‘The Past Remembers You Differently’)

‘Time slides through the flesh.
Someone on the corner is imprinting the building
with a kind of humanity’

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Nothing- not even the nothing- gets written by us" Dimitrov states in the final line of the final poem in section IV. Just before the last poem, Dimitrov's longest (?) at six pages. The sentences never disappoint. Dimitrov writes raw and rough. One wants
to take some of these poems to bed. The collection as a whole feels a bit crowded, overly long. That is my only complaint.

[Ashish Kumar · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is quite a long collection or at least it seems in comparison to other collections that I have read. Anyway, Alex Dimitrov in these poems examines what I would like to call “modern day loneliness and love":
// we slept with the doors open one more night.
And now when I try it alone it does not feel the same//,
the concept of time and place:
// already we’re here and already through it//,
and the duality of choice and want:
// For years, my friend looked for the perfect chair,
The space he wanted to be in.
Found it two summers ago - never sits in it //.

In these poems, the meaning changes from one line to the next and when you look at a poem as a whole it eludes comprehension because there are so many themes, so many different images, so many different Times in just one poem. There were few poems though that I didn’t understand at all, not a single line from them yet they felt good on my tongue. Sometimes, I came across lines that were hard to explain their meanings but I knew what those lines were trying to convey, for example // In the perfect field someone has left everything including themselves.
You. You should should stay here//.

A pure beauty. And Dimitrov has a new collection out called Love And Other Poems and I can’t wait to get it.

[Shrivatsan Ragavan · Rating 3 out of 5]

After spending about a month on this book, I understand that I bit off a lot more than I can chew. Dimitrov's style of poetry flits from one scene to another so frequently and the narrative if anything is pretty loosely connected. From what I understand, he uses this to mirror how memories work - glimpses of the past that flash in your mind in seeming randomness. For some of the poems it works really well. He also has some beautiful lines within a lot of these poems. But for a book of this size, it became more of a chore for me to finish it. The poems where he tends to focus on a particular subject like Lindsey Lohan or JFK jr., hold more memorability for me. Perhaps I'll enjoy some of these poems when I revisit them as individual pieces in the future.

2.5/5

[Chris Roberts · Rating 1 out of 5]

Poets engaged in state of being and or consciousness conflagration,
will realize they are oxygenated cliches
and attempt and fail,
to avoid the suicidal urge, to fall in love with the straight razor.

If there were no sins, life would be a boring, cardboard box filled with 9 to 5 alarm clocks AND OR a box filled with this thing, this book.

Chris Roberts, God Absolute

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

“If you’re asking, if you still need to know, it’s hardly time to go home.”

[Lida · Rating 5 out of 5]

F U C K !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Samuel Luther · Rating 3 out of 5]

overall, the poems all felt verbose, making it a bit laborious to read.

i do like the tone of the poems, and a few lines here and there stood out to me.

for the most part, i felt pretty lukewarm towards this collection, though.

[Maggie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dimitrov's style is one I haven't quite seen before. Instead of associative leaps between stanzas or images, Dimitrov bounces the reader line to line, sentence to sentence, trusting (and rightfully so) in a meaningful whole. The jarring displacement from line to line is syncopated enough to mirror the tumult of sadness that enshrouds the collection. A few of the poems I felt were overwritten, the endings appearing 3-4 lines before their actual close. With such a long collection, the content got a bit tired, but still, the majority of the collection stuns.

[Cynthia Arrieu-King · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally got around to reading the library's copy of this and will now order it.

The book is evocative of city life, of empty spaces, of missed connections. But the collage approach which is not at all the same as associative leaps, but more staccato and glimmering to me, allows the poem to have many different sheens and surfaces within one poem, something that is quite tough to do. The length of the poems and the way each wades into a mood rather than sets up a subject to be "about." Therefore the poems, to me, feel organic, embroidered, and a true lyric poem with both a classically emotional, sumptuous, full of beautiful/nature's silence and people leaving, and at the same time somehow gets in there something cold and perfected from ads. I read this fairly quickly when I started and then started to sink in a bit more. Even reading most of it this morning, I took my time and felt that each poem was getting to something more or deeper than before, even more like an essay. I think this writer (checked the Twitter feed) is working on a novel to which I look forward.

4.5 stars

Going to use some of these poems to teach as well.

[Brent Shenton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This entire collection takes on a unique tone and mood, one of truncated emotional connection followed by long periods of disconnect. Dimitrov does an excellent job of playing with the push and pull of these emotions, particularly with his use of a short meter throughout the collection. You can really feel the emotional distance in how the words are presented on the page, and the syntax lends itself to this evocation. Dimitrov knows how to create spectacular images over the course of a few lines, with my favorite being the ending lines of "Out of Some Other Paradise",

"What street, I don't remember,
on the way to someone's going-away,
I saw you, as if in the middle of a sentence,
snow: your new evening clothes."

Overall, a beautiful, lonely text that allows for an introspection that is not necessarily quiet, but thorough. It keeps in mind our relationships with ourselves and the environment around us.

[Eliana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Poems of this form befuddle me in both the reading and the making. How does one differentiate between “good” poems and “bad” poems in this form—fragmented and sprawling and collaged? Where cadence and sonic value seem to lack, how does meaning itself rise to the occasion and take over through initially disjointed image, metaphor, introspection? How do we measure a poem?

I would also appreciate assistance in understanding a certain choice of punctuation throughout the entire collection that never allowed me, as reader, to fully settle into a line. I kept being interrupted, perhaps even annoyed, reminded that I was reading a poem. I was made so very aware of my stuttering readership, staccato blinks over the words. And I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Nonetheless, so many of these poems held me spellbound in their wake, especially in the first section. Best read aloud, I think.

“I almost believed love then someone new called me / and time’s been repeating…” (from ‘Cocaine’)

[Caitlin Conlon · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up. The book jacket describes these poems as being made from “a collage aesthetic and a multiplicity of voices” which is an incredibly accurate depiction. While I found the collage-like style of these poems interesting, with their lines that are almost non-sequiturs, it almost felt like a little too much. Many of the poems have a rough “story” that we followed from beginning to end, but some were difficult to find a thread with. I think if you go into these poems hoping to unlock their meaning and really analyze each one in depth, this could be a fun read. As is, I enjoyed these poems individually but a whole collection of them felt too long for comfort.

That being said, a lot of those individual lines are absolutely stunning even out of context. This would be a great book to use to gather prompts and ghost lines for a writing workshop and for that reason I will certainly be returning to it.

[wulvz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dimitrov told my friend that this one was nowhere near as good as love and other poems but I found Together and by Ourselves to be an equally beautiful compilation of poems.
I can say that his prose didn’t feel as well defined as it did in Begging For It or Love & Other Poems but I refuse to say this book didn’t make me cry (a lot). So much beauty in every poem. I can’t recommend Dimitrov and all of his work enough, it’s like free therapy, his experiences he shares are so visceral and specific yet it’s somehow impossible to not relate them to your own life, half of the poems in here were so raw and connected I felt like he was writing about my life. To me that is incredibly special, to know there is another brain that unpacks itself so deep (for beauty or for the ugly). Dimitrov is my hero (though he seems insufferable on social media, but what brilliant artist isn’t a little diluted by their own ego a bit).

“Something in us needs water so we give it to someone else”

Ty Alex

[Delia Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

A dreamlike document, never cheesy somehow, about people and love, and the absence of people and love. I finished this book around 5am, while everyone else was having a loud party in the other room and I didn't want to be around anyone anymore. I retreated to the bed with the door closed, with the cat. The day was coming back after night, and this book was with me. I didn't feel it the whole time I was reading it, but as I closed it, the loneliness swelled up like the the navy blue in-between of days and clothes and streets.

[Robin Eckensberger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Winter taught me to wear a very thin nothing those evenings. / When the car sped through the tunnel, when the cemetery / filled with the living, when the drink was named / for what we couldn’t quite taste. / And you didn’t decide on the friends or the lovers, / the shoes or the card that was sent and said / come—it’s a party for all of our questions. / And why shouldn’t we have it. / Why not invite what no one can have.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Dimitrov's work and have been sort of stalking him through lit journals, waiting for his second collection to come out. Such a great contemporary storyteller and philosopher - he tells very personal stories about his life, but ties in observations about the world on a grander scale. A great follow-up to Begging For It.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a complex syntax and rhythm to negotiate here. Haunting and rewarding. "... We are stones that grey on./ And if you keep your eyes there's room for a question --/ what makes happiness different from anything else? / "Well," said the boy, 'I thought we knew more than that. "/ ... Soon became every day we attended by promise or boredom. / 1955. 1939. 1990."

[Megan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little associative for my personal taste, I appreciate the tone throughout and the kind of ethereal, city wanderings in here. Felt like a modern Frank O'Hara with a John Ashbery sensibility for meandering thoughts and sentences. Beautiful throughout.

[girlgotnoidentity · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alex Dimitrov makes me feel alive again. But he also makes me question my existence all at the same time. I'm in love with his words.

[Zhamilja · Rating 3 out of 5]

And you. You, you, you
you can read these lines in any order
because I want to leave nothing out
and there’s nothing here.
Words are just words. What I feel
I feel twice and risk three of.
Some new thing.
How there’s more here without us at all.

[Nora Rawn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not as much a fan of this as his first collection; the scansion in the more collaged lines didn’t sing for me, the allusions seem unnecessary, and the lack of an anchored narrative voice all were challenging for me.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

No mistaking it, this is the best collection of poetry to come out sofar this year. So much detail, description, and utter raw feeling. I loved every line of it. Couldn't give this enough stars

[Erik Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

"People stuck in more traffic but moving. / Someone thinking of us. Someone setting the knives."

[Selena · Rating 5 out of 5]

review to come.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

discordant reality gaga --

[Corin · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

“Surely, he thinks,
like the boardwalk, the afterlife is crowded;
where would anyone find peace there.”
—Alex Dimitrov

[darce vader · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was disappointed in this collection. . . It felt empty and lacked depth.