“Astonishing . . . A pure-gospel shout to the vaulted heavens.� —D. A. POWELL Written in the aftermath of brain trauma, this astonishing collection takes us through a glittering underworld of illness and recovery, on a confrontational, explosive trip that is at once euphoric and brutal. Through the painful process of rehabilitation and the lingering effects of illness, including a gradual loss of vision, Alex Lemon undergoes a forced metamorphosis that shatters the divide between pain and joy. These poems invoke, proclaim, decry, and serenade the world that results after the violation of identity. From the taste of blood to a glimpse into the opening heavens, the hallucinatory poems of Hallelujah Blackout are an expedition of self made foreign: when the membranes that divide mind and body rupture and the space between them is made, visible, radiant, alien. It is a rapturous reclamation of the body and a mournful ode to what has been lost. Without relying on familiar narratives of despair and pity, this collection serves as a tender hymn to the decay, crimes, and promise of human life.

Poetry Finalist for the 2019 Writers' League of Texas Book Award Over the course of four collections of poems, Alex Lemon has become known for his kinetic voice and sense of the dark absurd. Now this electrifying poet moves in a new direction—with a book-length sequence at once intensely vulnerable and thoroughly of our moment. Populated by visions and ghosts, Another Last Day follows its speaker on a search through a natural landscape turned on its edge, the landscape of today’s America. In these poems, the moments of an ordinary day are rendered in raw, nearly hallucinatory detail: Ants drunk on cherry-red hummingbird nectar. An ambulance rushing into the distance. Endless rain. And, stranger: A dog carrying a hand in its mouth. An emergency room filled with moans. A place where reality and dreams merge, where “the dead refuse to be left / underground.� When Lemon’s speaker invites us “behind my closed eyes,� it is into the vision of a speaker so plugged into the livingness of this world that he is tossed to the edge of living itself. And yet, in his poems, this openness is never just painful. “the world is a terrible place,� he writes, “but I want to last forever // clinging to its teeth.�

His freshman year of college, Alex Lemon was supposed to be the star catcher on the Macalester College baseball team. He was the boy getting every girl, the hard-partying kid everyone called Happy. In the spring of 1997, he had his first stroke. For two years Lemon coped with his deteriorating health by sinking deeper into alcohol and drug abuse. His charming and carefree exterior masked his self-destructive and sometimes cruel behavior as he endured two more brain bleeds and a crippling depression. After undergoing brain surgery, he is nursed back to health by his free-spirited artist mother, who once again teaches him to stand on his own.
Alive with unexpected humor and sensuality, "Happy "is a hypnotic self-portrait of a young man confronting the wreckage of his own body; it is also the deeply moving story of a mother's redemptive and healing powers. Alex Lemon's Technicolor sentences pop and sing as he writes about survival--of the body and of the human spirit.