Alex Lemon Quotes

Being deeply aware of fragility and ecstasy seems to me an essential part of being alive and living fully - and there's no way for me to separate this from my poems.

Poetry needs to be alive, unabashedly, and, for me, that entails seeing its complexity, the grit and grimness and jubilance and beauty.

I think of my best poems as vessels that I can or hope to fill with everything I have.

Poetry does need a bit of ferocity. The only way to attend to the fractured world is to write a ferocious kind of music, to sing that volatility.

The world comes to us in fragments and shards. Whatever stories we shape from our days, we're always dealing with gaps, blank-spots, and blackouts - and in handling all these breakages, we are, at all times, so incredibly intimate with sharp edges, the unending knife-like moments of failure and joy in our lives.

I see the relationship sincerity/humor differently. Instead of seeing a balance between them, I see them more inextricably linked, as if one is the hard candy shell that gives to the other, or one is the apparition, the ghost-image that invokes the other.