{"product_id":"all-us-beautiful-monsters-poems-9781639551828","title":"All Us Beautiful Monsters: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA deeply imaginative collection by a beloved poet with the \"ability to slice straight through nerve and marrow on his way to the heart and mind of the matter\" (Tracy K. Smith).\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHaving extensively detailed his experience with a traumatic brain injury, Alex Lemon writes with the remarkable ability to transform the depth of pain into brilliant light. His enthralling new collection charts a visual map of the sprawling mind, translating images that alight behind the eye. It is a luminous study in contradictions: corporeal bewilderment and overwhelming apathy, the levity of dreams and the acridity of existence, aching grief and radiant joy. In turns evoking an imperative you and a collective we, our omniscient speaker is urgent and complex; he's existential, dissociative, unable to recognize himself in photographs, and powerless in the face of the world's crises. \"I'm right here,\" our speaker says. \"Smack dab on planet nowhere, awaiting \/ The infinite ways a body can absorb \/ Pain.\" \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut in spite of its melancholia, this collection embraces the lightness and beauty that prevails. Lemon interrupts the banal imagery of the everyday with surrealist fantasia--he paints \"the purpled vault of night\" with \"glowing eels\" and visualizes \"grief etched into \/ The air by songbirds.\" These poems turn their lines into nesting dolls of images, holding \"The world. In my chest.\" \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAll Us Beautiful Monsters\u003c\/i\u003e renders in loving, painstaking detail the complexities of life, of the earth, of humankind--in all our terror and wonder. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eBinding Type:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e Milkweed Editions\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 03\/10\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN:\u003c\/b\u003e 9781639551828\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 120","brand":"Alex Lemon","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":52161369473205,"sku":"9781639551828","price":15.3,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0473\/0804\/6492\/files\/img_082cb90c-805a-447f-976f-a96868e74bfa.jpg?v=1768318117","url":"https:\/\/pastforward.org\/products\/all-us-beautiful-monsters-poems-9781639551828","provider":"Past Forward","version":"1.0","type":"link"}