Alex Dimitrov + Dorothea Lasky: Ecstasy: Poems

Join us for an in-person event with poet, Alex Dimitrov for the launch of his new poetry collection Ecstasy. Joining Alex in conversation is poet and author Dorothea Lasky. This event will be hosted in the Strand Book Store's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway on 12th Street.

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Strand Book Store is an ADA compliant venue. The event space is accessible via elevator. Please ask a Strand employee upon arrival for directions to accessible seating if preferred.

ASL interpretation is available for this event by request only. Please reach out to our events team at [email protected] by 3/18 to request.

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A fearless, revelatory collection from one of the most talked-about poets in America, whose poems have been embraced by critics and readers alike as candid, intimate, and magnetically charged (“like catching a glimpse of the full moon in the middle of the day” —Bomb)

Alex Dimitrov embraces a life on the edge in New York and the finely wrought poetry that can come out of it as he explores sex, drugs, parties, pleasure, and God in the 2020s, and looks back to a coming-of-age in the 1990s that still informs who his generation is and will be. His unabashed and drivingly musical poems are a call against repression, a rebuke of cultural norms and shame, and a celebration of human authenticity—even if to live under such philosophies is dangerous. In “Today I Love Being Alive,” we find the poet naked in his kitchen, eating a banana and obsessed with a new lover, declaring “I don't care about being remembered. / I care about . . . Strong men. Beautiful sentences. Italian leather;” in “Poppers," he stands lightheaded in the bathroom at a bar, “thinking of what to do / with the rest of my life,” and issuing a warning to himself and us: “Poetry / is not a self-help book.”

Dimitrov is an iconographer of contemporary life, able to pin profound and timeless meaning to a fleeting encounter in the street. Ecstasy also engages with the poet’s Christian upbringing, interrogating faith as both an enemy and valve of catharsis, and a bedfellow of what this book celebrates and courts: profound human ecstasy.

Photo credit: Milton Wong

Alex Dimitrov is the author of four books of poetry, including Ecstasy, forthcoming from Knopf this spring. He lives in New York City.

Dorothea Lasky is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including the forthcoming MEMORY.

Host or Publisher The Strand Book Store