Original event dates: 2025-04-23 19:00:00 — 2025-04-23 20:00:00 America/Chicago
BookPeople welcomes Alex Dimitrov in conversation with Jennifer Chang to celebrate the release of Ecstasy.Please welcome Alex Dimitrov with Jennifer Chang to celebrate Ecstasy!
This event is free and open to the public.
- Start time: 7:00 P.M.
- Run time: 45-60 minutes, followed by a signing line.
- Location: The second floor of BookPeople.
The author will be signing and personalizing copies of the book after the speaking portion of the event.
- To get a book signed, a copy of the event book or an item of equal value must be purchased from BookPeople.
Guidelines:
- Seating will be on a first-come, first-served basis.
- If you have any other questions, please visit our Eventbrite FAQ. If your question isn’t covered in the FAQ, feel free to email us at online@bookpeople.com.
- All event guidelines are subject to change.
- BookPeople reserves the right to cancel or postpone this event if necessary.
- There will not be a live stream or recording available.
About the book:
A fearless, revelatory collection from one of the most talked-about poets in America, whose poems have been embraced by critics and readers alike as candid, intimate, and magnetically charged (“like catching a glimpse of the full moon in the middle of the day” —Bomb)
Alex Dimitrov embraces a life on the edge in New York and the finely wrought poetry that can come out of it as he explores sex, drugs, parties, pleasure, and God in the 2020s, and looks back to a coming-of-age in the 1990s that still informs who his generation is and will be. His unabashed and drivingly musical poems are a call against repression, a rebuke of cultural norms and shame, and a celebration of human authenticity—even if to live under such philosophies is dangerous. In “Today I Love Being Alive,” we find the poet naked in his kitchen, eating a banana and obsessed with a new lover, declaring “I don’t care about being remembered. / I care about . . . Strong men. Beautiful sentences. Italian leather;” in “Poppers,” he stands lightheaded in the bathroom at a bar, “thinking of what to do / with the rest of my life,” and issuing a warning to himself and us: “Poetry / is not a self-help book.”
Dimitrov is an iconographer of contemporary life, able to pin profound and timeless meaning to a fleeting encounter in the street. Ecstasy also engages with the poet’s Christian upbringing, interrogating faith as both an enemy and valve of catharsis, and a bedfellow of what this book celebrates and courts: profound human ecstasy.
About the author:
Alex Dimitrov is the author of four books of poetry, including Ecstasy, forthcoming from Knopf this spring. He lives in New York City.
About the moderator:
Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, winner of the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, A Public Space, Poetry, Georgia Review, The Believer, The New York Times, and Yale Review, and she has published essays on poetry and culture in New Literary History, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, The Volta, Blackwell’s Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, New England Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books. She serves as the poetry editor of New England Review and since 2003 has been on the staff of Kundiman.
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Thank you for supporting Alex Dimitrov, Jennifer Chang, and your local independent bookstore!
Venue: BookPeople
Organizer: BookPeople