The Wish Book

Although I'm not much of one myself, I've always had a soft spot for talkers. It's ironic that some of the biggest talkers are also given to solitude, with their desire to unburden themselves a reflection of a life spent mostly alone and in silence. Lemon (Fancy Beasts) is a poet who jam-packs his work with living speech that embraces the globalized world's curious mixture of physical and virtual particulars. His latest volume demonstrates some of the electric loneliness that permeates the repertoire of big talkers, but the voice that propels it is intelligent and self-deprecating, both angry at the world and in love with it, too. Lemon's landscape allows for no passive objects: all possess emotional agency and glow with its potential. But exuberant speech is constantly in danger of becoming a monolog, an exercise in self-regard that threatens to exclude the audience altogether. While the poems here largely avoid that pratfall, it will be interesting to see how Lemon negotiates this issue going forward.