In 2006 Alex Lemon published his debut book of poetry, Mosquito, a heart-wrenching journey that portrays Lemon’s experiences as a brain surgery patient. This review will mostly be about the poem “Cocoon,” which is a prose poem and thereby not parted into stanzas.
The poem has no rhyming, no alliterations, but is more like a sort of listing.
Knowing the writer’s background, it seems that “Cocoon” has autobiographical elements when things have gone wrong for the writer himself. The writer has been doing sports and been a very active young person, and then suddenly, one day, a stroke hit. It might be one of those situations where he asked himself: What are the odds?
Cocoon works like a kind of listing of experiences that might happen. Many of the things are over the top, like, for instance, the first line, “No matter how well we live, there will be mornings when 3,000 pounds of jet fuel spill from an airplane racing across the sky.” This might happen, yes, but it is so far removed from the “normal human being” that it is almost comical. It is one of those moments where you want to ask: What are the odds? And yet, there will be mornings when this will happen. All in all, the poem is tragicomical, naming things that are so wild and ironic that the reader will have a hard time knowing if it is best to laugh or cry. In the further reading of the poem, the details get more grotesque, but without of place phrases like “Saint of Ice Cubes,” “Cashew Moon,” and “shakes wicked the hummingbird he’s squeezed into a bottle.” Lemon has put together words that are not usually together to estrange the language and give new meaning to the words to evoke feelings and mental images exactly how the author wishes.
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