Days

Description

Hank Lazer

ISBN 10: 0971086109
ISBN 13: 978-0971086104
230 pages: $14.95
January, 2002

“This is a book filled with joy. The works are marked as well be reverence. The guiding genius is Thelonious Monk’s – the poems dance, they also kick. The days of Hank Lazer’s Days shake up the lyrics in which they are inscribed.”
–Lyn Hejinian, Poet, and Professor of English at U.C.-Berkeley

“This playfulness casts us under the spell of a ‘hip gnosis’ (to use one of Lazer’s outlandish puns) that open us, in the way only music and poetry can, to the intimations of love, friendship, and spiritual searching found everywhere, every day, inside these pages.”
–John Gery, Poet, and University Research Professor, University of New Orleans

“These are beautiful – and peaceful – poems, signs of a mind and hand immediate with its materials.”
–Norman Fischer, Poet, and Zen Buddhist priest

“Days locates itself in the charged rift between immanent and daily experience and our textual heritage. Hank Lazer seamlessly ventriloquizes such poets at Stein, Pound, Eigner, and Plath, sometimes against the grain, making the familiar words new.”
–Rae Armantrout, Poet, and Professor at U.C.-San Diego

Days is Hank Lazer’s first large collection of poetry to appear in six years. Written over the span of one-year-and-a-day, Lazer’s new book is a laboratory space for experimentation with the resources and possibilities of the short line and for new modes of lyricism. His previous books of poetry include Simple Harmonic Motions (INK-A! Press), As It Is (Diaeresis Chapbooks), 3 of 10 (Chax Press), Early Days of the Lang Dynasty (Meow Press), Doublespace: Poems 1971-1989 (Segue Books), and INTER(IR)RUPTIONS (Generator Press). With Charles Bernstein, he edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press. His two volume collection of critical writings on contemporary poetry, Opposing Poetries, was published in 1996 by Northwestern University Press. Along with Jake Berry and Wayne Sides, Lazer is a founding member of The Alabama Poetry Ensemble. A Professor of English, Lazer is Assistant Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Alabama.