Bill Lavender deploys here the weapon he's hesitated to use until now: the "I," in its most bitter-sweet reflexive lethal mode. The barrel is pointed at a mercilessly dissected self that it fires at with compassion and a wealth of sportive detail. This book is an amazingly beautiful collection of (self) hunting notes.
-- Andrei Codrescu
Each word has two meanings, it's regular meaning and the other one: let's rejoin the hoopla till "the onrushing host loops thought as a green sprig".
-- Bernadette Mayer
This is sharp swish writing in tongues forked twixt Horace and Lorca and everyman & woman you have or have never met. I call it a gift that keeps giving "to see, to understand or think immediately." Keep smiling, keep reading, all your friends are here and then some, though the "ground of imago is fear / a paranoid metropolis" -- but we know a paranoid city is a city knows the facts -- and why worry, there’s a hospital of grammar copulating beneath a full moon. For Bill Lavender is the doctor of present experience, be that in oddly populist states, rich republics or cities emerging from the water, like Atlantis spelled backwards.
-- Pierre Joris |
