Alex Lemon, All Us Beautiful Monsters: poems

 

NO DOOR NO

Welcome
to my party
of special 

favors—waiting
cages gaped
open table ablaze
with perfect 

silver & molten
blitzcake the tease
heavy-breathing 

sweat down your
neck howlsugar
from our night- 

mare garden
O blossoming
sweet glow
O cherry bomb

The seventh full-length poetry collection by Fort Worth, Texas poet Alex Lemon, and the first I’ve seen, is All Us Beautiful Monsters: poems (Minneapolis MN: Milkweed Editions, 2026), an assemblage of first-person lyric narratives, blending elements of observation and meditation. Held in five numbered sections of clustered lyrics, the collection opens with the single-page poem, “AWKWARD HUG,” an accumulation of couplets that closes with: “I’m wide open so come // On in here. Soon, each / Morning, you will tremble, // Glow, feeling the ticking / Pulse of the new bomb // That wakes in each of us.” Lemon offers both invitation and warning, providing and broadcasting a similar narrative personal warmth and external anxiety to another recent title through the same press, Denver, Colorado poet and editor Wayne Miller’s The End of Childhood (2025) [see my review of such here]. “Here,” Lemon writes, as part of “OM NOM,” where everyone gets / A trophy to pile atop the rest of our / We can’t ever get enough, where / It’s always happy hour somewhere / & somewhere else a manatee stares / Into the sunshine with its dead eyes / As it floats its bloated way toward / Nevermore.”

Writing of subjects including cataclysm, Godzilla, destruction and bugs, there’s a wistfulness to these pieces, providing short poems-shaped offerings of hope and agency; a lyric of attention and appreciation to the small and immediate moments; fear for the future and a hope for the possibilities of what can and might still be. “To push back against / The fear,” he writes, as part of “BUGS NEED HUGS,” “I turned / Myself into a machine / With arms that did / Not stop chopping.” Despite the world around him, there is, throughout, a pervasive optimism throughout Lemon’s pragmantic dark, a hope articulated across a pacing of rhythm and phrase, couplets or longer stanzas, one slow step or phrase after another. “Maybe it is wonderful—,” begins the poem “MISERICORDIA,” “How slow every life // How every slow life // Shudders forward // Every life a slow / Motion [.]” There is a way through, Lemon offers, even a dark purely lit from within. In the end, one supposes, it is not simply engagement with the larger world, but an engagement that purposefully and empathetically attends those immediately around us, as his poems suggest, even despite ourselves. His is a dark, pragmatic and glorious optimism. Or, as the poem “RECESS” ends: “Each morning / The magnolias / Ablaze with hope.”