The poetry of Alex Dimitrov stays in the present. It’s the essence of contemporary. A living voice, an urbane voice, overstimulated and sweet and stylish and aware. To say it’s talkative is only to highlight the point, and point to its tradition, which is very old, older than the New York poets who embodied it, James Schuyler and Frank O’Hara and others: it’s as old as the intimate cutting voice of Catullus or the troubadours of Galicia. New York is not so much the subject of Dimitrov’s work—particularly true in his latest collection, Love and Other Poems—so much as its raison d’être. Even a poem like “New York,” a catalog of places in New York the speaker has cried in, is a love poem to “the best city to cry in.” Dimitrov’s voice is casual, open aesthete, open-hearted in a way that doesn’t forgo acid worldliness. No one could call his lines naïve, and yet they record—almost can’t help themselves—moments of awe, happiness, painful clarity, or, the beauty of true feeling, up or down. In that sense, Dimitrov is a first-class artist of the art of feeling, of giving a mood a shape in language.
