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    Together and By Ourselves
    Together and By Ourselves
    Together and By Ourselves
    Ebook121 pages57 minutes

    Together and By Ourselves

    By Alex Dimitrov

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    About this ebook

    Dimitrov is a vital new energy in American poetry.”Los Angeles Review of Books

    Truth-telling, raw, fierce with feeling.”Brenda Shaughnessy

    Dimitrov can sound at once hip and naive, devoted to the sincerities that other sorts of poets reject or obscure.”Publishers Weekly

    Together and by Ourselves, Alex Dimitrov’s second book of poems, takes on broad existential questions and the reality of our current moment: being seemingly connected to one another, yet emotionally alone. Through a collage aesthetic and a multiplicity of voices, these poems take us from coast to coast, New York to LA, and toward uneasy questions about intimacy, love, death, and the human spirit. Dimitrov critiques America’s long-lasting obsessions with money, celebrity, and escapismwhether in our personal, professional, or family lives. What defines a life? Is love ever enough? Who are we when together and who are we by ourselves? These questions echo throughout the poems, which resist easy answers. The voice is both heartfelt and skeptical, bruised yet playful, and always deeply introspective.

    from "Water"

    What is aging exactly?
    There are new jobs and people
    and someone dies before noon every day.
    I am swimming and swimming in May or an ocean,
    I don’t see the reason. But that’s unimportant,” you said.
    Just keep doing it over again until one day you can’t.”
    Spring excites us and we know what it is every time.
    The minutes in meetings are life’s most undistinguished;
    that’s obvious. And what’s obvious makes us all fools
    then fast friends.

    Alex Dimitrov is the author of Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), Begging for It (Four Way Books, 2013), and the online chapbook American Boys (Floating Wolf Quarterly, 2012). He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize. His poems have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, Tin House, Boston Review, and the American Poetry Review. He is the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets where he edits the popular online series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine. He has taught creative writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Marymount Manhattan College, Bennington College, and lives in New York City.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateApr 11, 2017
    ISBN9781619321694
    Together and By Ourselves
    Author

    Alex Dimitrov

    Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poetry, Together and by Ourselves, Begging for It, and American Boys. He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize. His poems have been published in Poetry, Slate, Tin House, and the New Yorker. He is the Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets where he edits the popular online series Poem-a-Day and American Poets magazine. He has taught creative writing at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, Marymount Manhattan College, Bennington College, and lives in New York City.

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      Book preview

      Together and By Ourselves - Alex Dimitrov

      I

      Together and by Ourselves

      I opened the window so I could hear people.

      Last night we were together and by ourselves.

      You. You look and look at Diver

      for Crane by Johns and want to say something.

      In the water you are a child without eyes.

      Yesterday there was nothing on the beach

      and no one knows where it came from.

      There’s a small animal lodged somewhere inside us.

      There are minutes of peace.

      Just the feel. Just this once. Where does the past,

      where should the period go?

      What is under the earth followed them home.

      The branch broke. It broke by itself. It did break, James.

      We were there and on silent. We were delete, shift, command.

      Slow—in black—on an orange street sign.

      Missing everywhere and unwritten—suddenly—all at once.

      Him. He misses a person and she is still living.

      I haven’t missed you for long and you are so gone.

      Then he stepped away from the poem midsentence…

      we must have been lonely people to say those things then.

      But there are rooms for us now and sculptures to look at.

      In the perfect field someone has left everything

      including themselves. You. You should stay here.

      It’s a brutal and beautiful autumn.

      With his hands in the sand, on the earth, under time

      he touched something else.

      People are mostly what they can’t keep and keeps them.

      And inside the cage of the Ferris wheel you saw the world.

      In the steam, on the mirror: you wrote so so so...

      so if you’re looking for answers you’re looking

      at every water tower around here.

      Why does the sea hold what it loves most below?

      Fear. Hopeless money. All the news and the non-news.

      How could anyone anywhere know us? What did we make?

      And the leather of your chair…it has me marked

      so good luck forgetting. The world was a home.

      It was cruel. It was true. It was not realistic.

      Make sure you date and sign here then save all the worn things.

      Because everyone wants to know when it was,

      how it happened—say something about it.

      How the night hail made imprints all over.

      Our things. Our charming and singular things.

      Always

      We’re good at keeping how we shouldn’t feel.

      On the ferry to the island I burned alone that way.

      At least, he thought, there ’ll be an earth to sink in.

      The last scenes in Shakespeare I forget to breathe.

      When history caught up with us: no less cruel than our parents.

      Wanted to tell you of the psychic witch who found my life with one eye

      though we weren’t speaking then and here you’re dead.

      I’ve put a period to end each thought that won’t end.

      Come into my house (they were) and talk to me about another life.

      The park is true and in perpetual August. Yes, I’m late

      and going, going back there.

      These small hopes. Traces. Spit on the sidewalk.

      I’m an adult and feel less urgent every day.

      No one’s number matters but the voices anchor;

      and the coolness at the bottom of a memory

      or how people stop to watch the moon together.

      Finally knowing you, I know I cannot know you.

      This body’s terrible at your religion.

      And why eternal life if pleasure’s time-bound

      and each new year’s a killing…

      he said, the dead are one long summer.

      Walking, going nowhere

      and some punctuation in an emailed note

      reminds me who I am more so than what I’ve written.

      I would pause for you and be a million commas.

      The way a flock of birds will leave a tree.

      Not just the sound or lifting.

      That’s where I want to put my hands inside you.

      And I found it on a train, beside lit pools,

      passing mountains near the city dust

      between the ribs or where the dusk waits.

      I gave my life a real nice show.

      And then you went away so I could see you

      as graffiti in a bar just once.

      A man is stepping on the moon.

      The earth or your one life is gone.

      The phone rings in your leaving.

      Let your black hair, let your black hair

      get in my way always.

      Seduction and Its Immediate Consequences

      One April in autumn you were my story for hours.

      The silence of those days became like a shirt.

      "His screaming fits were nothing other than

      attempts at seduction, writes Freud in The

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