reviewed on May 28, 2025

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The cover of Alex Dimitrov’s fifth collection is no doubt deliberately hideous, modeled, it would seem, after the lo-fi Geocities aesthetic of Forever Magazine, Dmitrov’s equals in the manipulation of literary celebrity.

 

It is difficult to tell, however, whether the poems themselves are purposefully rudimentary or whether Dimitrov is truly as flat and as attenuated of a writer as the work suggests.  Which is to say that the particular intellectual framework one puts around Dimitrov matters a great deal: is he bad, or bad in a way evocative of the world-weary melancholia of the middle-aged gay man?  How is one to read such blasé efforts at profundity like “there was nothing left of my American youth / that could fill me back up” and “once you’ve had what you want / you just want it again”?

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One way to answer these questions might be to invoke Yvor Winters’ notion of “imitative form,” delineated by the Stanford poet in his under-appreciated Primitivism and Decadence, from 1937.  “To say that a poet is justified in employing a disintegrating form,” Winters wrote with mic-drop disdain, “in order to express a feeling of disintegration is merely a sophistical justification for bad poetry, akin to the Whitmanian notion that one must write loose and sprawling poetry to ‘express’ the loose and sprawling American continent.”  For Winters, “imitative form” was an error, and Ecstasy itself would be as thick with fallacies as it is with fellatio.

 

Whether readers agree will depend on their own tolerance for the kind of quasi-Conceptualism in which Dimitrov traffics.  As in the work of Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, whose tendencies toward the racially inflammatory he shares, Dimitrov concerns himself less with pleasure than with provocation.  How bad can I be? he asks.

 

And he is “bad,” by the standards of contemporary poetry, not only in style but in subject matter.

             

            If I used language such as

            first-generation queer immigrant experience.

 

            […]

           

            All humor and irony must be excised

            in an effort to further clarify intent.

 

            […]

 

Use the word problematic.

 

And if poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

And if you actually believe that.

 

This is Dimitrov in molotov-mode, and it is a delight.  While his enemies will read Ecstasy as the privileged dick-picaresque of the well-connected New Yorker, Dimitrov relishes and returns such animosity, larding the book with such barbs as “or how ‘everything is political,’ / someone has to say this mid-conversation” and “the job of a poet today / has become kissing ass,” a proposition which Preposition belies.

 

To be sure, the objections to his work are not unfounded.  At his worst—which is also, intentionally, his best—Dimitrov is Lana del Rey meets latter-day Matthew Dickman, all cigarettes and sunrises and blowjobs in bar bathrooms, without a single “privilege check” to be found.  And any objection to Ecstasy would demonstrate more scrupulous and thoroughgoing intellectual assessment than Tas Tobey seemed capable of in The New York Times.

 

​Dimitrov would reject, though, the Romantic infatuation with “authenticity” of which present-day poetry remains enamored.   

 

Or, as he puts it in “Poppers”: “Fuck the self.”

 

It is worth noting, of course, that Dimitrov’s own literary success has come because of—not despite—who he is, just as poetry of the “first-generation queer immigrant experience” partakes in the commodification and marketing of identity.  As François Cusset diagnoses, such writing capitalizes on "symbolic discriminations without analyzing the culture industry as a whole, with its endless ability to absorb negativity, exploit margins, swallow and recycle criticism, and gradually shift from mass promotion to a more timely marketing of differences."

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In ways that set him apart, perhaps, from other self-portraitists, Dimitrov seems aware of what Cusset calls "the terrifying ability of the free market to ceaselessly appropriate for its own purposes any negativity that seeks to remain exterior to it."  Deliberately flat in affect, therefore, and attenuated in intellect, Ecstasy offers an anti-oracular poetics which is never anything other than banal, rising to no more ecstatic epiphany than “time is the oldest story,” for instance, or “everything is a lie / but everything is still beautiful.”

 

Or, it's a fact—kiss, kiss.​​