Noah C. Lekas Returns With A New Poetry Album & Chapbook: FLOWERS OF PERENNIAL DISSENT

“The artist's job is to stand naked in front of their audience, and I knew that to do this project I was going to have to be vulnerable in a way that I'm not publicly.” - Noah C. Lekas

Poet, singer, rock band member, mailman—Noah C. Lekas has lived a life that refuses to fit into a single category.  After seven years, he returns with Flowers of Perennial Dissent, a new poetry album and chapbook that documents six supervised psychedelic therapy sessions during his recovery from a prolonged—and nearly fatal—illness. The result is neither a memoir nor a poetry record in the traditional sense, but a singular narrative experience: a first-person account of ego death, healing, mysticism, and the struggle to reconcile with the often extraordinary experiences of everyday life.

Where Lekas' acclaimed debut collection Saturday Night Sage consisted of a series of blue-collar poetic vignettes, Flowers of Perennial Dissent follows a more structured narrative, and features musicians Luther Dickinson (North Mississippi Allstars, The Black Crowes), Charlie Parr (Minnesotan country-blues musician), Anthony Pirog (guitarist and leader of jazz-punk band The Messthetics), Ethan Miller (Comets On Fire, Howlin’ Rain), and James Toth (Wooden Wand), who transform each piece into a spoken-word psychedelic folk record. 

Drawing from the traditions of Beat literature and Gonzo journalism, Lekas serves as both narrator and participant of his own journey: Across six poems, listeners encounter conversations with ancestors, questions of consciousness, spiritual collapse, revelation, and the fragile process of rebuilding meaning after illness. “There's no way to be honest about this experience without being vulnerable,” states Lekas. “Saturday Night Sage was vulnerable, but it was vulnerable in a way that's acceptable, that's cool. This one is much more like turning yourself over to the mysticism.”

Speaking on the origins of the album, Lekas recalls that “Three facets of my life kind of collapsed at once. I had physical health issues, I lost my career, and I subsequently had mental health issues [...] Everything I thought was linear failed to be linear.” As a result, the project began with re-reading the notes kept during his therapy sessions. “I started going back through the notes, and that’s when I felt obligated to do something with them, to just make them useful, to somebody who didn't have the experience, or to myself, really.”

For Lekas, the act of documenting the experience became a way of affirming what happened to him: “Logging it, and creating something of it to cement it in as much truth as I can felt important to me [...] I started with cementing it for myself, as like this actually happened. I had this experience, it's written, it can't be erased.”

At the heart of Flowers of Perennial Dissent is the question of what it means to rebuild a life and an identity after the structures that once defined them have collapsed. For Lekas, ego death played a role in his ability to confront chaos, accept uncertainty, and learn how to move forward: “Ego death starts with the introduction of chaos,” Lekas explains, “and then that radical acceptance idea of, like, how do you not give up on your dreams and the things you love without living in delusion?”

To transform the six poems into music, Lekas enlisted Luther Dickinson, Charlie Parr, Anthony Pirog, Ethan Miller, and James Toth. “I had my thirty or so pages of notes, and then I contacted each musician who I had met or known, whether through writing or through music over the years [...] I had had some personal connection with everyone on the record.”

Lekas approached each musician with an open door to interpret his work however they saw fit. In just one paragraph, he included “what happened, an introduction to the project, the title of the track, and a two to three sentence description of what it was about. I said, “Can you create a soundscape, a piece of music—whatever you want—that's this length?”” 

The result is a spoken-word record in which each musician transforms the writer’s work into a distinct musical experience. According to Lekas, the collaborative process was both exciting and daunting. “That part was intimidating, working with people who aren’t just peers, but people whose art I genuinely love. I'm a genuine fan of everybody on this record.”

However, Lekas made a conscious choice not to send the musicians the full-length poems. In that sense, Flowers of Perennial Dissent represents a fundamental shift from his previous work. “On the first record, Songs of the Shadow Factory, we created music for the poems,” Lekas says. “This time I decided to do it the opposite way. I really liked that idea of just letting the music inform the poetry a little bit.” The words and the music thus have a symbiotic relationship; on one hand, the music was composed with the writer’s themes in mind, and on the other, the poems were further formed upon hearing the music. 

On “A Revolution In Just Existing,” Lekas meditates on the idea that existence itself is an act of resistance: “In one of the ketamine sessions, I had this realization that revolution is continuing to exist—your existence is a revolution. Just existing is an act of dissent, and that’s what that third track, “A Revolution In Just Existing” is about.”

The album closes with “At the Edge of Time”. It’s a track that challenges our traditional values surrounding transcendence as an escape from the world—whether it be the ascent to a Christian heaven, achieving enlightenment, conquering your enemies, or going from rags to riches. 

““At the Edge of Time”, has a very anthemic chorus, but the whole thing folds back into that cosmic reality,” Lekas explains. “Rather than externally ascending to heaven or climbing your way out of the shit of humanity—which is a very linear, physical hero’s journey—life isn’t meant to be a hero’s journey at all. We’re not on this arc of our own greatness; it’s an internal thing. As you go through life, you continue to move through yourself. You’re constantly moving back through yourself, and the momentum of who you are and what you are continues to carry you forward. As you move inward, reality becomes more infinite.” 

Despite the album’s emphasis on mysticism, spirituality, and psychology, Flowers of Perennial Dissent is in no way an academic commentary, nor is it a case for psychedelic therapy. Instead, the project is an attempt to remain open to the mystery of the experience, for the artist’s sake and for that of his audience: “I'm not an academic, and I'm not a theologian,” Lekas says. “I'm a guy who had an experience, and wrote about it.”

Flowers of Perennial Dissent will be released on October 23, 2026, and will be available on vinyl, CD, streaming platforms, and as a limited edition chapbook. Click HERE to pre-order the album and chapbook today!