Cape pre-empts Dimitrov’s 'Ecstasy'

Jonathan Cape has pre-emoted Alex Dimitrov’s new poetry collection, Ecstasy.

Željka Marošević, editorial director, bought British Commonwealth rights from Marya Spence at Janklow and Nesbit Associates. Jonathan Cape will publish Ecstasy in spring 2025. Deb Garrison, poetry editor at Knopf, acquired US rights, also as part of a pre-emptive deal.

Ecstasy is billed by Cape as "the major new collection from Alex Dimitrov whose poems such as ‘The Years’ and ‘Someone in Paris, France is Thinking of You’ in the New Yorker have gone viral".

Cape said: “In Ecstasy, Dimitrov explores the sensation of ecstasy in all its forms: romantic, sexual, drug-induced and spiritual. Beginning in Manhattan and finally taking us across America, London and Paris, Ecstasy is a revelatory exploration of sex, God, parties, New York, drug culture, and old school Americana.

“These are poems that steal attention from their reader and hold it, with fierce and hypnotic possession. Dimitrov is an iconographer of contemporary life, able to pin profound and timeless meaning to exact time and place, much in the way that religious imagery in churches tell of universal and placeless experience.”

Dimitrov said: “I’m very happy to be in the good hands of Jonathan Cape and to be publishing Ecstasy in the UK. I’m a New York poet and I already feel very welcomed.”

Marošević said: “Dimitrov is the natural successor to Frank O’Hara, with the same irrepressible conversational style and warm immediacy. Ecstasy is an essential collection full of lines you can’t help but recite and share – reading him is like walking the streets of New York, leaving the party early, falling for another crush. Dimitrov has captured the zeitgeist and already drawn so many readers to his work.”

Dimitrov is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize and has written several other books, most recently Love and Other Poems, published by Corsair in the UK in 2021.

His work has been published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review and the Atlantic among others.

Also a teacher of creative writing at NYU where he is writer in residence, Dimitrov previously worked at the Academy of American Poets where as an editor, he also founded Wilde Boys, a queer poetry salon in New York.