Feverland: A Memoir in Shards

by Alex Lemon

Overview

“Alex Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity.”—Mark Doty

Brain surgery. Assault weapons in the bed of a pickup truck. Sophia Loren at the Oscars. Rilke, Rodin, and the craters of the moon. Recovery and disintegration. Monkeys stealing an egg outside a temple in Kathmandu. Brushing teeth bloody on long car rides under blue skies. Pain, ours and what we bring to others. Wildfires in southern California. Rats in Texas. Childhood abuse. Dreams of tigers and blackout nights. The sweetness of mangoes. A son born into a shadowy hospital room. Love. Joy.

In Feverland, Alex Lemon has created a fragmented exploration of what it means to be a man in the tumult of twenty-first-century America—and a harrowing, associative memoir about how we live with the beauties and horrors of our pasts. How to move forward, Lemon asks, when trapped between the demons of one’s history and the angels of one’s better nature? How to live in kindness—to become a caring partner and parent—when one can muster very little such tenderness for oneself? How to be here, now? How to be here, good?

Immersed in darkness but shot through with light, Feverland is a thrillingly experimental memoir from one of our most heartfelt and inventive writers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571318428
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	09/11/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Alex Lemon is the author of Happy: A Memoir, and the poetry collections Mosquito, Hallelujah Blackout, Fancy Beasts, and The Wish Book. His writing has appeared in Esquire, Best American Poetry 2008, AGNI, BOMB, Gulf Coast, jubilat, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Open City, Pleiades and Tin House, among others. He was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and he contributes and reviews frequently for a wide range of media outlets. He lives with his wife and two children in Fort Worth, and teaches at Texas Christian University.

Read an Excerpt

EKG

I heart the rock-and-roll stardust, steroids that let you live, all the spilled love and still being alive. I heart Twizzlers, tangerines, until the stomach can’t take any more. I heart knots, the perfect peel. I heart the heaving. I heart banging my head when I fall in the shower, banging my head on the curb. I heart making out in the ghosting cold. I heart the lips warm. I heart shame on me. Novocain, hydrocodone is what I heart. Ativan, Percocet, I heart you, too. Heart a handful of heart-shaped candies. I heart the moist perfume of Whoppers on the fingers I kiss. I heart the past—drinking through the blackouts and onward, crashing ass over piehole down the apartment stairs. Pills, I heart pills. I heart waking with my head’s dried blood glued to the pillow. I heart asparagus-and-beet salad dusted with manchego. Not remembering speaking to you, that is what I heart. What did I say? I heart. I heart it all wrong, I heart it until it shatters into a thousand sharp hummingbirds. I heart my mother pushing my wheelchair through leaves along the barge-clanging Mississippi. I heart muggings, the quick cut, the knockdown. I heart shame on you. I heart it right. I heart keeping my fingers crossed. I heart going for long, cane-dragging walks, smoking cigarette after cigarette in Minnesota’s winter air—puffing myself light-headed, until I fall into the snow. Too deep, I heart, too long. I heart having nothing while pretending to have it all. I heart every last joint that I’ve smoked, every pop, every line. I heart the pretty. I heart instead, maybe, might. I can’t see, I heart you. I heart walking blindly into traffic. I heart still believing in something better. Still believing, I heart. I believe, I heart. I heart dead animals beneath my bed, in the walls. I heart visitors. I heart I am not home. I heart songs that go on too long. I heart a tight chest. I can’t breathe, I heart. Numb face, too, I heart. I heart amphetamines, amphetamines, amphetamines. The shock of the coldest water, I heart. The ugly, the ugliest, I heart you, too. The belly-up flies on the windowsill, I heart, the orange peels drying in the sun. I heart making love premorning. I heart that assemblage, the way it all falls down. I heart never getting tired. I heart not being able to get out of bed. Codeine my heart, I heart. I heart the bed spins that come each night, the vertigo that makes me claw the air. I heart the butcher beneath my ribs. I heart it all wrong. I heart no speed limit and flicking my headlights off. I heart swerving beneath the moonlight. I heart the kitchen with the oven baking bread. I heart the midnight inside me, nail-holed with starlight. I heart the slowdown, the traffic jam. I heart gutting walleye along the shore, the turtles sunning on rocks. The guts, I heart. I heart your body. Your body, I heart. I heart the darkness my boy tells me he knows. His thundering run through our home, I heart—the way he starfishes in his sleep. I heart the bruise of watching him grow up too fast. The good burn and blister of my daughter’s fat-cheeked grin, I heart. I heart knowing I can do nothing about the pain the world will deliver upon them. I heart trying to soak up as much hurt as I can. I heart there is no time to give up, there is so little time. The art of the impossible, I heart. The heart, I heart, I heart. Each ache inside me, I heart. Open windows in winter and blue skies, I heart. That hard work of the heart, I heart. The heart overripe, I heart, the heart always raw. The heart churning, I heart, the heart aflame. The good heart gone bad, I heart, the good heart always coming back. The chandelier heart, I heart, its wicked sparkle, its champion gleam. I heart this heart, this last, this only, this heart glowing swollen because always, we are all about to die.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

EKG

I Was Already Ready When I Was Dead

Migrants in a Feverland (CL)

Kissing God

King of the Rats

Migrants in a Feverland (MN)

My Misogyny

Heartdusting

I Can Hold My Breath Forever

Things That Are: On Pleasure

Migrants in a Feverland (LV)

Like So Many Nightmares

Migrants in a Feverland (NYC)

Rabbit Hole Music

Way Up High Way Down Low

Migrants in a Feverland (NM)

Becoming Animal: A History

How Long Before You Go Dry

All Night the Cockroaches

Migrants in a Feverland (TX)

Fuck the Alamo or Never Forget

Notes

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Feverland

“What a marvel of a book. In its rigor, variance, and sonic playfulness, Feverland makes a winning argument for the case that a life—in all its trial, tenderness, and physical troubling—is best presented in shards, as the subtitle indicates. Why? Because these vivid and surprising shards that Alex Lemon gives us teem with heft and life, evocative diction and sticking image, narrative brilliance and lyric mystery.”—Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses

“Feverland is a life turned on its head and dissected so that each ugly thing, each shiny bobble, each meanness, each fury of need, each ache, each bloom of love is laid bare for us. Alex Lemon has offered us an essential long stare into the bleak yet textured truth of illness, abuse, and disability; at the same time he offers us the one thing we all cling to despite it all: beauty and survival. Lemon's intense and stratified essays lean in and tell us the hardest thing we've ever heard, then embrace us so tightly we think we might burst from the sheer joy of being alive.”—Ada Limón

“Lemon’s bold decision to eschew narrative allows him to portray a sense of life as he lived it, with the blending of memory, sensory immediacy, and hopes and fears in a waking nightmare. In taut, vibrant prose, he pieces together the fragments of his life . . . His sparkling language and repeated motifs provide unity, and there is profound insight—even humor—in this tale from the dark side.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Alex Lemon’s Feverland uses an unconventional structure to tell the story of its author’s life to powerful effect. . . . Lemon’s memoir is moving, unpredictable and sometimes digressive—in that, too, it’s a lot like life itself.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“I didn’t read Feverland—I plunged into it. Alex Lemon’s mind comes at you in a hot, mad rush, and you experience him as you experience your own past, all at once. A good memoir leaves you feeling that you know another person. This one, somehow, leaves you feeling that you know yourself as well.”—J.C. Hallman, author of B & Me: A True Story of Literary Arousal

"[A] funhouse of memories . . . Feverland goes deeper into the experience of living in a body hellbent on self-destruction.”——City Pages

Praise for Happy: A Memoir

“Lemon makes Happy harrowing and upbeat, writing with a poet’s touch about the illness that overtook his jock life. . . . Nonfiction writers and poets have a secret alliance—working toward defining a truth instead of making it up. So when we get a twofer of a poet writing memoir, the results trend toward glinting precision.”—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Lemon takes his reader inside the terror and strangeness of illness—and gives us, along the way, a loving portrait of a devoted, wonderfully nutty mother. Lemon is a brave, headlong writer, and he captures the life of the body with vivid and memorable intensity.”—Mark Doty

“The pyrotechnic prose of Lemon’s memoir creates an electrifying portrait of a body in crisis, and the way the soul is inexorably, reluctantly, dragged along. . . . If ever a book was written in blood, it is this one.”—Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

“Lemon packs the poignant wallop of a sprawling Dickensian novel with his taut, speedy memoir.”—Denver Post

“This one is something special. . . . This is the story of a boy and his mother, but one whose tenderness sneaks up on you while you’re distracted by all the blood and booze and hollering. The two of them can talk about nearly anything, but don’t always have to. What Lemon and his mom have is that rarest of things in a trauma memoir, a parent-child relationship that is more than merely ‘functional.’ It’s funkily, goofily, supremely life-affirming. Make that lifesaving.”—Salon

“One of our time’s most compelling memoirs . . . An electrifying portrait of a body in crisis.”—Esquire

“A page-turner on par with the best thrillers . . . Lemon’s exquisite prose blasts us out of our own time, heart, brain, and body into his, making an acute empathy possible. Read this and weep, laugh, weep.”—Library Journal (Editors’ Pick)

“Dazzling . . . An unnervingly intimate, relentlessly poetic recounting of debauchery, trauma and healing, Lemon’s memoir is cut from the same cloth as David Carr’s The Night of the Gun or James Frey’s discredited A Million Little Pieces. But whereas those autobiographies reveled in the seamy details accompanying the wild life, Happy is far more concerned with the party's aftermath. . . . There are few modern works that so elegantly capture a mind and, by extension, a life on the verge of disintegration.”—Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“Happy is graphically raw and in-your-face; Lemon’s dexterity with words forces the reader into gritty latitudes no one would visit voluntarily, and the level of detail will cause some readers to squirm. But Happy is an honest voyage into Lemon’s keen mind, remarkable spirit and loving heart, and it shouldn’t be missed.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

From the Publisher