An Evening with Alex Dimitrov and Nicole Tallman

***Please note: This event will take place at the Books & Books in Coral Gables at 265 Aragon Ave. Tickets are FREE and books will be available for purchase at the event.

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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.

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

Nicole Tallman is a poet, writer, and editor. Born and raised in Michigan, she lives in Miami and serves as the official Poetry Ambassador for Miami-Dade County, Editor of Redacted Books, and Poetry and Interviews Editor for The Blue Mountain Review and South Florida Poetry Journal. She is the author four collections: Julie, or Sylvia (Thirty West Publishing), FERSACE (ELJ Editions), and Poems for the People and Something Kindred (The Southern Collective Experience (SCE) Press). She is also the creator and host of ELJ Editions/Redacted Books' Be Well Reading Series and the Lunchtime Poetry & Jazz Series at Miami-Dade County's Main Library. Find her on social media @natallman.

Host or Publisher Books & Books