DC’s Royals: A Celebration of Drag – Washington Blade
‘Love and Other Poems’
By Alex Dimitrov
c. 2021, Copper Canyon Press
$17.00/119 pages
“I love red shoes. I love black leather,” queer poet Alex Dimitrov writes in his poem “Love.”
“I love the grotesque ways in which people eat ice cream–on sidewalks, alone–however they need it, whenever they feel free enough,” Dimitrov enthuses.
The poem appears in Dimitrov’s fab new poetry collection “Love and Other Poems.”
Nothing could be more welcome as the isolation of the pandemic morphs into “Hot Vax summer.”
We’ve been starved for love — from romance to hugging our friends to dancing at our fave queer bar, to buying flowers — in our city.
Whether you’re an avid reader of obscure poetry journals or you read poetry as rarely as many poets read the tax code, “Love and Other Poems” will satisfy your love jones.
It’s fitting that Dimitrov dedicates the volume to “our city of New York.” From the moment you read the book’s opening lines, you know the collection is a, by turns, ironic, comic, poignant, love poem to New York.
“I don’t want to sound unreasonable/but I need to be in love immediately,” Dimitrov, 36, who lives in New York, writes at the start of the book’s first poem “Sunset On 14th Street.” “I can’t watch this sunset/on 14th Street by myself.”
“You can say New York is beautiful/and it wouldn’t be a headline/and it wouldn’t be a lie,” he writes later in the poem.
“Love and Other Poems,” though wholly original and of the moment, is an homage not only to New York City but to the openly queer New York poet Frank O’Hara.
O’Hara, who lived from 1926 to 1966 and worked as a curator for the Museum of Modern Art, wrote witty, moving poems on Billie Holiday, Lana Turner, his boyfriends, parties, paintings and ecstatically, waking up to love, coffee and cigarettes.
“I live above a dyke bar and I’m happy,” O’Hara wrote in “You Are Gorgeous And I’m Coming,” a love poem.
O’Hara moved poetry from the stuffy realm of the Academy into bars, the movies – the streets. He called his work “I do this I do that” poetry.
Yet, “O’Hara was a first-class intellectual,” Grace Cavalieri, Maryland’s 10th Poet Laureate, told the Blade in 2014. “He just wanted lunch at the foot of Mount Olympus where the party was.”
The same can be said of Dimitrov, who was born in Bulgaria and raised in Detroit.
He received a bachelor’s degree in English and film from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 2007 and an M.F.A. in poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2009.
His previous poetry collections include “Together and By Ourselves” and the chapbook “American Boys.”
He is the former senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited Poem-A-Day and “American Poets.” With Dorothea Lasky, he is the co-author of “Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac.”
In 2009, he founded Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York City, which he ran until 2013. Renowned queer poets and writers from Mark Doty to Edmund White to Michael Cunningham read their work at the salon.
Like O’Hara, Dimitrov is a flaneur in New York. In “Love and Other Poems,” we follow him over the course of a year as he lives and goes about in his city.
There’s a fine line between paying homage to a poet you admire and being overly imitative of that poet’s work. Dimitrov comes close to crossing the line. The title of one of the collection’s poems “Having a Diet Coke with You” riffs off the title of O’Hara’s poem “Having a Coke with You.”
Yet, Dimitrov’s voice is his own. The love in his poems is for not only New York but the moon, Stonewall, difficult men, glamour and the dead.
Though filled with darkness as well as light, with loneliness as well as bar-hopping, his work isn’t sappy.
“No one’s allowed to tell/their sad story at my funeral,” he writes in “Notes For My Funeral,” “No one’s allowed to tell/my sad story at my funeral.”
“Love and Other Poems” is the shot in the arm we need this summer.