Alex Dimitrov, _Begging for It_

The book's cover bears a photograph from David Wojnarowicz's "Rimbaud in New York"--someone at a table in a diner, next to the desserts display case, wearing a t-shirt, a sleeveless denim shirt, and a Rimbaud mask. It's a good choice, alluding simultaneously to the poète maudit tradition--risky behavior, contempt for conventional acclaim, linguistic fireworks--and to an awareness that the role is well-established, a trope of its own, a mask one can put on.

Dimitrov can bring the risky behavior ("His jaw clenches because your blood mixes sweetly / with the flower under his tongue"), he can bring the contempt for conventional acclaim ("Would you sleep with the poet who wrote this poem? / Would you buy his book? Click here"), and again and again he brings the linguistic fireworks.

Self-Portrait Without the Self

On the edges of the body is where I stood,

trying to feel my way to the center.

For years, it was all I wanted.

Clawing at the small cells,

kicking in the bones to make room

for something more permanent.

And this morning, tired of my lips,

the way my hair will sometimes tilt

to one side, a lover of extremes,

every part of me, slanted

as if towards another body--

I no longer want the center:

this heart, or what's in it.

I want what isn't mine

and what will not last.

And yes, your heart will not last.

The wonderful thing is that he also brings a self-consciousness about his own enterprise, a knowingness that though his is a road less taken, quite a few even so have taken it.  It's a self-consciousness one detects in the names cited (Sontag, Barthes, Judith Butler) and a certain in-jokiness ("This Is Not a Personal Poem"). The self-consciousness was far from a problem, I should emphasize, for me--it was more of a saving grace than anything. I don't think I would have trusted the poems without it. It's the posing poets who don't even know they are posing that you want to steer clear of.