Emergency Anthems eBook Alex Green
Download As PDF : Emergency Anthems eBook Alex Green 
“Alex Green is the uncrowned poet laureate of the last day of Summer and his first book is an absolute stunner—rich with metaphor, confessional honesty, and melancholy narrative. In Green’s sun-battered landscape, it’s always the last day of summer, nothing worked out the way it was supposed to, and the optimistic pop songs in the background play a jangly counterpoint to real life disappointments. In the afterglow, he finds humor, revelation, and that much maligned old measure of poetic meaning beauty. Green forgoes opaque linguistic ornamentation in favor of coherent narrative, honesty, and lyricism. His gift for sudden and surprising metaphors is unmatched. This is a collection to return to over and over again and one that marks the debut of an important and refreshing poetic voice. Emergency Anthems is incredible, my favorite book of poetry of the last five years. Maybe of any five years.” --Jesse Michaels, author of Whispering Bodies
Emergency Anthems eBook Alex Green
Alex Green’s Emergency Anthems is some of the most beautiful poetry I have ever read, so passionate, so evocative (feline in its movement), so precise (canine in its attentiveness), so straight up and inarguably good it makes me giggle when I read it. The word stunning applies here; these are poems that sizzle. I love Alex’s poems the way I love my favorite songs. These poems sing like a train on its rails.Like Brassai or Hopper, Alex captures darkness, nights, those underwater hours when we are most uncertain, when we can feel our exuberance, our hope, stagger like a boxer, surprised by his own fisticuffs, that first slant and stumble when we realize we may not remain on fire. If we are lucky we live a burning youth; these are poems about our mortal shift toward adulthood, shadowy and desiccated, where, from time to time, we singe ourselves on these embers. If we live with our truths, the truths Alex delineates in this slim volume, we are damaged photographs, cracked, underexposed, overexposed and burnt out, hanging in battered frames. We are a history of shipwrecks, perhaps, chum for the ravages of memory. Alex’s poems are cities built of palaces, as smooth as vinyl, fountains, but they throw punches like middleweights and they swim like bullets when they sniff the thinnest stream of blood; in their presence, you will keep no secrets. “though wish and world go down,” ee cummings wrote, “one poem yet shall swim.”
The best poetry reads like a secret language in which you are already fluent. Alex’s poems are a map of a world fully-realized; its colors derive from Oscar Bluemner and Matisse, but its geometry is straight from Cezanne, the kind of shapes that withstand the press of your fingertips, that neither bend nor buckle. Alex is an illusionist, a magician – he tricks you into his ethers, saws you in half, makes you think this world is extant and, sad and darkling as it is, makes you wish you lived there, that its loveliness might always be yours. Once you’ve read these poems, you will memorize their species of light. They are muscular and sharp, pushing through thick water with a flick of the tail, the slice of a dorsal fin, sleek and streamlined, the break of a bite, a diagram of blood on the sand, the end of summer.
Lift these poems off the beach and put them to your ear, listen to the echoes of the greats: the loveliness of cummings, the desperate romance of early Leonard Cohen, the playful, vivid language of John Ashbery or Jim Carroll. Here’s Cavafy, “The God Abandons Antony”:
listen – your final delectation – to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
Reading Alex’s poems, we find ourselves in the midst of an ecstatic geography, somewhere between Serguesa and the rest of our lives. It is always August, dusk, and we are haunted by calendars and clocks. These are poems that rekindle our love for language and its possibilities, flags of triumph for those of us who still believe that words can be as evocative, as cinematic, as shimmering, as musical as any other medium. I want to stuff myself full of Alex’s poetry. It makes me feel better. It makes me believe. Could life be this vivid? This lovely? This sad? Here’s an abridged version of “Birthday Poem in B-Flat”:
Later the bees are gone, but nothing has changed.
It’s still summer, it’s still June,
you still hate your life so much
you can taste it on the back of your throat.
And in every dream the hive is bigger;
in every dream, breathless against the branches
the beekeeper’s son raises it to the sky,
and it lifts him above the house.
And this is what Emergency Anthems does. It takes me above the houses.
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Emergency Anthems eBook Alex Green Reviews
Green's poetry is astonishing. He creates moving and deeply evocative dreamscapes of a lost California, rich with literary sensibility but without obscure language or grad seminar referents crammed sideways into the text.
You may detect a critique of post-modern poetry in that last sentence. While I do find a lot of contemporary poetry self consciously opaque, my point is positive, not negative Green's work is incredibly refreshing. This type of poetry is not only good but it is necessary to wrest the poetic conversation from theorists and restore it to the world at large. The language is never unnatural and meanings are always accessible and yet contain an element of mystery that is at times other-worldly. Smart, eerie, dream - like, melancholy and sometimes frightening, if I had to come up with a genre tag for what he does I would call it "California Gothic." The most impressive thing about these poems is the way that they tell a multilayered, coherent story without being limited to a chronological narrative. Events hang in time as a tableau, resonant with dark emotion and strange sublimity. Beauty is slightly ominous, contemplation is fraught with unshakable anxiety. Alongside all the poignancy, Emergency Anthems is also very playful and at times, downright hilarious. The ghost in the machine is a love for pop music and the fluorescent paint spatter of 1980's high school culture. I simply can't recommend this book highly enough. Rather than trying to describe the poems further, here is an example
"At Makena beach on Maui, seven people are attacked by a shark in nine days. It could be all different sharks, but that's not the point. The point is they have been married three days and now the honeymoon is ruined. She's sad about the places they could have gone, but she mourns Paris the most. Honfleur, Gleyre, she tells him. Entreat, Bougival, The Hotel des Roches-Noires. He says he's only heard of the last one. That night in the disco, she finally admits he's not a good dancer. Later when she sleeps he longs for the nasty thrills of old crimes. Six days later they still haven't gone in the water. She watches a rerun of a sitcom from 1982 in Portuguese. He loses one thousand seventy-three dollars in a shell game to a guy in a hat whose hands move like chopper blades. In the afternoon they walk around the suite with their backs to each other. It's the kind of Sunday afternoon that makes you want to kill someone. Weeks later, when the shark is finally gone, no one will really know. There won't be a meeting or a memo, it will just be a guess, a turn of the instinct that says Now. After that, it's hard to say what will happen next. In the meantime they keep going to restaurants and just sitting there. At dusk surfers paddle in and dissolve on the beach into sandy coats of bruised reds that strum acoustic guitars before twitching fires. When it gets dark, couples walk away from each other across parking lots; sharks burst from shipwrecks and start looking."
Buy it, read it. You're a poorer you without it.
Fantastically short short stories of a simplicity to pull you in, and a complexity to fire the imagination and leave you thinking. To say nothing of the laughs and fleeting sadnesses. Stories to return to again and again, just lovely. The perfect title and cover too.
With the literary landscape stocked with memoirs and one too many yarns about teens saving a parallel universe, Green's poems and shorts rise above the cacophony to deliver a savory morsel of something our palettes have gone too long without.
Alex Green’s Emergency Anthems is some of the most beautiful poetry I have ever read, so passionate, so evocative (feline in its movement), so precise (canine in its attentiveness), so straight up and inarguably good it makes me giggle when I read it. The word stunning applies here; these are poems that sizzle. I love Alex’s poems the way I love my favorite songs. These poems sing like a train on its rails.
Like Brassai or Hopper, Alex captures darkness, nights, those underwater hours when we are most uncertain, when we can feel our exuberance, our hope, stagger like a boxer, surprised by his own fisticuffs, that first slant and stumble when we realize we may not remain on fire. If we are lucky we live a burning youth; these are poems about our mortal shift toward adulthood, shadowy and desiccated, where, from time to time, we singe ourselves on these embers. If we live with our truths, the truths Alex delineates in this slim volume, we are damaged photographs, cracked, underexposed, overexposed and burnt out, hanging in battered frames. We are a history of shipwrecks, perhaps, chum for the ravages of memory. Alex’s poems are cities built of palaces, as smooth as vinyl, fountains, but they throw punches like middleweights and they swim like bullets when they sniff the thinnest stream of blood; in their presence, you will keep no secrets. “though wish and world go down,” ee cummings wrote, “one poem yet shall swim.”
The best poetry reads like a secret language in which you are already fluent. Alex’s poems are a map of a world fully-realized; its colors derive from Oscar Bluemner and Matisse, but its geometry is straight from Cezanne, the kind of shapes that withstand the press of your fingertips, that neither bend nor buckle. Alex is an illusionist, a magician – he tricks you into his ethers, saws you in half, makes you think this world is extant and, sad and darkling as it is, makes you wish you lived there, that its loveliness might always be yours. Once you’ve read these poems, you will memorize their species of light. They are muscular and sharp, pushing through thick water with a flick of the tail, the slice of a dorsal fin, sleek and streamlined, the break of a bite, a diagram of blood on the sand, the end of summer.
Lift these poems off the beach and put them to your ear, listen to the echoes of the greats the loveliness of cummings, the desperate romance of early Leonard Cohen, the playful, vivid language of John Ashbery or Jim Carroll. Here’s Cavafy, “The God Abandons Antony”
listen – your final delectation – to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
Reading Alex’s poems, we find ourselves in the midst of an ecstatic geography, somewhere between Serguesa and the rest of our lives. It is always August, dusk, and we are haunted by calendars and clocks. These are poems that rekindle our love for language and its possibilities, flags of triumph for those of us who still believe that words can be as evocative, as cinematic, as shimmering, as musical as any other medium. I want to stuff myself full of Alex’s poetry. It makes me feel better. It makes me believe. Could life be this vivid? This lovely? This sad? Here’s an abridged version of “Birthday Poem in B-Flat”
Later the bees are gone, but nothing has changed.
It’s still summer, it’s still June,
you still hate your life so much
you can taste it on the back of your throat.
And in every dream the hive is bigger;
in every dream, breathless against the branches
the beekeeper’s son raises it to the sky,
and it lifts him above the house.
And this is what Emergency Anthems does. It takes me above the houses.
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