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At the end of ecstasy / only the memory of ecstasy. / The tongue. The chorus. / The streets of flesh.

In Ecstasy, Alex Dimitrov embraces a life on the edge in New York and the finely wrought poetry that can come out of it. He explores sex, drugs, parties, pleasure, and God in the 2020s, and looks back to a coming-of-age in the 1990s that still informs who his generation is and will be. His unabashed and drivingly musical poems are a call against repression, a rebuke of cultural norms and shame, and a celebration of human authenticity – even if to live under such philosophies is dangerous.

In ‘Today I Love Being Alive’, we find the poet naked in his kitchen, eating a banana and obsessed with a new lover, declaring ‘I don't care about being remembered. / I care about . . . Strong men. Beautiful sentences. Italian leather’; in ‘Poppers’, he stands lightheaded in the bathroom at a bar, ‘thinking of what to do / with the rest of my life’, and issuing a warning to himself and us: ‘Poetry / is not a self-help book.’

Dimitrov is an iconographer of contemporary life, able to pin profound and timeless meaning to a fleeting encounter in the street. Ecstasy also engages with the poet’s Christian upbringing, interrogating faith as both an enemy and valve of catharsis, and a bedfellow of what this book celebrates and courts: profound human ecstasy.