At the end of ecstasy / only the memory of ecstasy. / The tongue. The chorus. / The streets of flesh.
Beginning in Manhattan and taking us across America, London and Paris, Ecstasy is a revelatory exploration of sex, God, parties, New York, drug culture, and old school Americana. Dimitrov is an iconographer of contemporary New York in the vein of Frank O'Hara, trading effortlessly between tongue-in-cheek axioms on love, the divine of chance encounters, and hazy, sacrosanct adolescent memories. These poems throb with the beat of New York City alleyways, the bathtubs of the Bowery Hotel, apartment balconies at night, and bodegas at dawn. Dimitrov stands in the bathroom of a bar "thinking of what to do / with the rest of my life,", issuing a warning to himself and us: "Poetry / is not a self-help book."
These are poems that spin provocatively between the wry and sincere, demand attention from the reader, and leave them breathless. Ecstasy is the major new collection from Alex Dimitrov whose poems such as 'The Years' and 'Someone in Paris, France is Thinking of You' in the New Yorker have captured the imagination of critics and readers alike.