Micro Review of Begging for It, by Alex Dimitrov

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Micro Review of Begging for It, by Alex Dimitrov

 

Four Way Books, 2013: $15.95 paperback

 

If there’s a poet with more verve and swagger out there, I’d like to meet that poet. As it is, I’d like to meet this one. In his debut collection Begging for It, Dimitrov shows that he’s a razor sharp poet who knows his way around the line and knows how to seduce the reader from one poem to the next. Early on in “Passage” he somehow coaxes Hart Crane back to this world (don’t ask me how), and then he gets Crane and those “sea-tempered eyes” to wash his hair at St. Marks Baths…and so much more: “this man who sings/ for the drowning, touches my lips/ and I ignite.” The ignition is somehow greater than the imagined sexual reverie. This is Dimitrov reaching into his pocket for his lighter while James Wright holds the fuse.
 
“What scent will your knuckles keep?” he asks at the end of the collection’s title poem. Then again, “What part of me can I give you to sell?” later on at the end of “21st Century Lover.” The questions Dimitrov often asks in his poems are both genuine and unanswerable, and they leave the speaker (and reader) feeling emotionally vulnerable and compromised, like he’s wondering openly about his place in it all—in the grander scheme of poetry, yes, but in a more simple reading, life. Throughout this book, in so many fresh ways, Dimitrov transcends any notion of begging and subsequently gives the reader something worth begging for.

—by Travis Mossotti