The March/April issue of Poets & Writers magazine contains a small profile of Alex Lemon, the 30-year-old TCU creative writing prof whose slight memoir Happy I semi-panned back in January, not long after the book came out, on no less an esteemed house than Scribner. The occasion for the profile is the recent publication of Lemon’s third poetry book, Fancy Beasts (Milkweed Editions). “Dark,” “darkness,” “black,” “dread,” and other deliciously macabre terms pop up throughout P&W writer Kevin Nance’s story but not without just cause: Happy is mostly about the recurrent brain hemorrhages that almost killed Lemon while he was in college and that damaged him for life –– the author still suffers from bouts of double vision, vertigo, and numbness of the face, among other things. Further amping up the morbidity, Lemon’s two previously published poetry books, Mosquito (Tin House, 2006) and Hallelujah Blackout (Milkweed, 2008), aren’t exactly pick-me-ups, and based on some P&W excerpts, Fancy Beasts is a continuation of Lemon’s “dark” style.
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