Ecstasy: Poems

In the fourth collection from Dimitrov (Love and Other Poems), readers are transported through the streets and local haunts of New York, Miami and Paris. “I walk up / and down Sixth Avenue / thinking of who I was six years ago. / The waiters at The Odeon / wink at me. A woman / in a gold dress drinks alone / and men in suits talk of the market.” There are honest depictions of hookups, partying, and drug use, plus undertones of heartbreak and depression: “Blew money mindlessly each afternoon. / Not because I had it. / But because I wanted to dig / so far down, if I left myself there / how could anything touch me.” Readers are taken from present day back to glimpses of adolescence throughout the collection, with multiple poems focusing on the experiences of a queer boy growing up in the United States in the 1990s.