Love and Other Poems

Starred review from January 18, 2021
“Love is hard to account for,” writes Dimitrov (Together and by Ourselves) in his joyous and captivating third collection. These memorably voiced lyric poems find his speakers expressing love for things local and cosmic. Driven by unsatisfied appetites, “broke and lonely/ in Manhattan,” Dimitrov’s urbane, wistful speakers recall those of Frank O’ Hara (a muse invoked in the epigraph and several poems), transcribing city life through taxis, bars, clubs, and restaurants. The tension between connection and distance frequently finds humorous expression, as when a speaker observes how “kids race toy boats in the pond/ and the dogs are on leashes,/ tied to their humans and better behaved.” Meditations on humanity’s search for meaning are handled with wit and vulnerability, while the book’s final section, the 14-page “Poem Written in a Cab,” breaks the fourth wall in a captivating performance of selfhood (“I have never wanted to be myself./ What a ludicrous obligation!”). Ultimately, it’s the sensory that keeps people tethered, suggests Dimitrov: “Every time I feel close/ to understanding the world... I rise, attending to / with annoyance and the pleasure/ of the unmade cup of tea.” In this affecting collection, his most fully achieved thus far, Dimitrov provides the reader with a needed celebration of pleasures.

November 1, 2020

Though he wouldn't have known it while putting together this collection, Dimitrov (Together and by Ourselves) provides the perfect antidote to our pandemic-fraught days, as exemplified by a 10-page title poem that hungrily embraces life with a cascade of reasons both profound and goofy, from being able to survive failing at love to red shoes, black leather, Saturdays, and "never being disappointed by chocolate." Even if he does like going home alone in a cab, the speaker is clearly a social animal--"A favorite thing about being alive/ or other questions no one asks me, / and it would be knowing people"--and in an affecting poem on Stonewall he nods to the dead, acknowledging the past as he revels in the present and hopes the future "is free of god and memory." Organized roughly around the calendar year, the poems flow nicely, and the setting is New York, to which the collection is justly dedicated. VERDICT An affirmative collection whose buoyancy doesn't feel Pollyannaish but earned.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2021
Known for hosting Wilde Boys, a queer literary salon in New York City, Dimitrov writes poems shaped by a cosmopolitan air of hip self-awareness. His third collection delivers candid snapshots of life for a gay thirtysomething in his city: good long cries in Washington Square Park, quick trips to the corner bodega to buy blueberries and cigarettes, writing poems in a cab at 3:00 a.m. While many of Dimitrov's poems address anonymous interlocutors, silent partners to whom his speakers intimate deep longing and desire ("The day I met you never ended for me"), several speak to certain people in particular, including an amusing snipe at critics ("No, you never got me") and a questionnaire for readers ("What part of your body do you trust the least?"). In a series of celestial-themed poems, Dimitrov matches perfect metaphors with profound reflections ("look up at the sky / as you wander alone / wearing your life / like a coat in July"), which is fitting for the coauthor of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac (2019).

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