The gospel according to St. Alex: Ecstasy. Alex Dimitrov. Knopf, 2025. 112 pages.
“Almost every religion’s history begins with one massive misperception; namely, making a fatal distinction between the sacred and the profane. Religions often put all their emphasis on creating sacred places, sacred time, and sacred actions. While I fully appreciate the need for this, it unfortunately leaves most of life ‘un-sacred.’”–Richard Rohr, OFM
Welcome to a temple that’s been pounded into its fucking place by Alex Dimitrov, stone upon stoned word. Ecstasy claims its space on behalf of the “...slightly lost but very forgivable / people like us.” And reader: that ‘us’ contains multitudes, as it were. The line to get inside this sacred structure is long and winding, but Dimitrov reminds us, in poem after poem, that we’re already there. How he re-minds us is part of his wickedly gifted prowess. As Henri Nouwen says, you don’t think your way into a new kind of living; you live your way into a new kind of thinking. Ecstasy offers a graduate-level course in metanoia, a wholly new kind of consciousness. The writer of this sacred text has taken great pains (aka ‘lived experience’) to open this temple’s doors, portals of entry into his mind, his body, and his throbbing, love-soused heart.
Profane: from classical Latin profanus, literally "before (outside) the temple.” Prebendary that he intends to be, Dimitrov grounds us in the quotidian before taking us inside:
"Lunch is the saddest meal of the day
and October is beautiful.
It should come around twice.
But it doesn’t. Some things
are singular. I think of you always
even if people tell me you’re terrible."
And take us inside he does, as “Soul Fucking” continues:
"What do they know about
soul fucking anyway?
It’s sad how even sex
becomes eating an orange.
Exciting at first and then
juice. Only juice."
Dimitrov stays with the thing, and here’s its well-kept secret: that’s all there are; things, in their infinite variety. But not, for Dimitrov at least, in the dismissiveness of detritus or refuse. There is no waste in this sacred economy, and Dimitrov doesn’t mess around, even if the exact opposite sounds steamily true:
"I only wanted the soul
and I’d soul fuck you
anywhere. Anyway.
I could watch you
peel an orange forever.
And right before death
we think of everything small."
Things ecstatic are things untethered, stuffs that do what they must need do, according to the demands of the day. “Monday” shows us how this can work:
"I was just beginning
to wonder about my own life
and now I have to return to it
regardless of the weather
or how close I am to love."
But even the ecstatic must return to themselves, to their ‘things,’ and one of Dimitrov’s things is whatever objet d’art happens to find itself within reach:
"We must pretend
there’s a blue painting
at the end of this poem.
And every time we look at it
we forget about ourselves.
And every time it looks at us
it forgives us for pain."
This is the definition of the coming and the going, the seeing and the being seen, that Ecstasy embodies. Consider, however, this locus of awareness, one day later, in “Tuesday:”
"I want to know you
like a dog touches the wind
with its tongue. I want to know
why time moves impossibly slow
when pain rises…."
Sex and sexiness run rampant through ecstasy, and through Ecstasy. After all, language itself is erotic, as Anne Carson reminds us in “Eros, the bittersweet:”
"If the presence or absence of literacy affects the way a person regards his own body, senses, and self, that effect will significantly influence erotic life. It is in the poetry of those who were first exposed to a written alphabet and the demands of literacy that we encounter deliberate meditation on the self, especially in the context of erotic desire."
The ubiquitous ache within Dimitrov’s words add up to the delicious tide of unfulfilled want, that thing not realized, made all the more powerful because of it. Carson continues:
"The singular intensity with which these poets insist on conceiving eros as lack may reflect, in some degree, that exposure."
Dimitrov drives this lack home, as he continues in “Tuesday,” exposing us to his own ultraviolet exposures of what it means to live in, and with, unrealized desire:
"and what makes [time]
speed up like two people
looking for each other
at the end of the night.
When was the last time someone
looked at you like a bridge
held by cold air?"
This closeness, though it may feel like a million-mile inch, also functions as a both-ness, an inclusive grace implicit in Dimitrov’s wide-open temple. Like a professor once told us, when studying the historical language for love used by the Greeks, as we tossed agape, and philia, and storge around the classroom, she said “For God’s sake, just get your eros right. Until you do, forget about that other stuff.”
Dimitrov gets his eros right. Rather, and perhaps more importantly, he lives it, an embodied building full of places and spaces that others can enter, as in “100%:”
"After years of being in love
with the wrong people
I’m still open like The Paris Theater"
Openness, too, is eros; availability and receptivity, in bed with the pain of what it means to traffic in such ‘gifts.’ Dimitrov takes his pain straight to the original source:
"Hello, God. What now?
Will I ever learn how to cook
and not use my oven for sweaters?
Will I stop expecting the French to love me!
Will I carry an umbrella on days
when it says 100% rain?
What is 100% exactly?
How could anyone be that certain?
Not even love feels that way…."
Ecstasy keeps posing the questions, queries that blink their weary eyes against themselves. “Who wants to be what they are?” Dimitrov asks in “Everything always.” The answer to that comes from within, as Ecstasy will demonstrate, reminiscent of St. Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle. Listen to Mirabai Starr’s introduction to her translation of the same:
"There is a secret place. A radiant sanctuary. As real as your own kitchen. More real than that. Constructed of the purest elements. Overflowing with the ten-thousand beautiful things. Worlds within worlds. Forests, rivers. Velvet coverlets thrown over featherbeds, fountains bubbling beneath a canopy of stars. Beautiful forests, universal libraries. A wine cellar offering an intoxication so sweet you will never be sober again. A clarity so complete you will never again forget. This magnificent refuge is inside you. Enter."
Why is Alex Dimitrov an ascendantly popular poet? Because he functions as an entry point, inviting everyone in, often at the cost of his own body and person. Some of that cost comes from those who don’t want the invitation at all (cf. Luke 14:13-14, and note well who on this earth is responding to St. Alex’s invite). Some of it hails from the inherent sanctity of one born into a world where things poetic are things often violently rejected or dismissed. Thomas Merton, renegade Catholic priest and tireless worker for peace, wrote “For me to be a saint is to be myself.” Alex Dimitrov, for better or for worse, is doing the work of being himself, basking, and sometimes burning, in the beautifully dirty holiness of wholeness. Ecstasy, in all its steaming, sexy mess, serves us nothing less than the whole enchilada. Tuck your napkin in for some of the spicy, suffering-filled sauce we find in “Blond summer:”
"I was going to write you the most delicate letter
but when I came home I couldn’t tell what I was.
Oh God. Oh Jesus. Oh Mary.
What the fuck am I supposed to do with myself?"
Add that question to our growing list of the same, a catalog replete with the wild and sometimes woeful openings that Ecstasy offers:
"Blond Chris in the summer of 1999.
You were my God once
but you know I have always been stronger.
And you were my blood here on Earth
but all you did was piss on my fear."
This is Dimitrov finding his own perfection, growing large from having to live in small spaces, and echoing Oscar Wilde in De Profundis:
"But it is when he deals with a sinner that Christ is most romantic, in the sense of most real. The world had always loved the saint as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of God. Christ, through some divine instinct in him, seems to have always loved the sinner as being the nearest possible approach to the perfection of man. His primary desire was not to reform people, any more than his primary desire was to relieve suffering."
Thus, this review is not a reclamation. Nor is it an attempt at any kind of redemption. Those are words exhausted from the history of who’s in, and who’s out. The temple that Alex Dimitrov has built in Ecstasy isn’t concerned with those details, minutiae that they are. The essentials of ecstasy, where the subject dissolves and/or merges into the object, is the reality of ex stasis, of the outside-itself, the inequilibrium (unequal libriums) that build unequaled libraries, where every shelf in every room of Ecstasy has a brass plaque screwed into it: Read What’s In Your Own Soul. Ecstasy is the story of someone who poses the same threat to poetry that any great spirit poses to the powers of his times. To this point, Emerson says it best, in Self-Reliance:
"Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost."
Dimitrov does this, speaking his latent convictions in poems that are universal in their sensibilities, as he writes in “Tripping in the USA,” precisely because his inmost:
"I don’t like anything
that prevents me from the interior.
All my life, all I’ve wanted
is to touch where that is."
has become the outmost:
"When everyone
in poetry gave me shit
though not much
has changed
but the fucks
I’ve run out of.
God bless that.
God’s nowhere."
Maybe God’s nowhere because Dimitrov has helped us see the holes in everything, in the everywhere-ness of the divine, all those sacred places where the chewed-up bodies of those who’ve lived to say “yes” (to a world obsessed with “no”) can safely go, can fully belong. Sounds an awful lot like holy communion to me. But if you’re still in doubt about St. Alex’s sanctity, read the final lines of Ecstasy. Beware, however: who you are means everything, when it comes to love. And love is just another word for God:
"If you forget
who you are
why you’re here
where you’ll go
what you’re doing.
I’m with you.
I’m with you.
I’m with you
Forever."
PDX-based writer and composer, Joseph Byrd’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Exposition Review, The South Carolina Review, Stone Canoe, CutBank, Pedestal, South Florida Poetry Journal, DIAGRAM, and Novus Literary Arts. A Facilitator with Shakespeare Behind Bars, and a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, he is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, was long-listed for the Erbacce Prize, and is a nominee for the Nina Riggs poetry award. He was in the StoryBoard Chicago cohort with Kaveh Akbar. An Associate Artist in Poetry under Joy Harjo at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, he is on the Reading Board for The Plentitudes. He is finishing his first novel as a Fellow in Fiction through the Attic Institute’s Atheneum master writing program.