by Bill Lavender
$10.00 | 85 pages | ISBN: 978-0979070204
Expansive, autobiographical, philosophical, farcical, musical, utterly engaging, Bill Lavender proves in this book his kinship (great-grand-nephew?) with France’s immortal Jacques Prevert. Makes one laugh and cry and sometimes both at the same time. A one-man chorale of invincible life, rising out of floods and exiles and returns.
—Anselm Hollo
…abuzz with language or like a lake’s surface running at night with 6-inch waves.
—Skip Fox
It’s as if a Greek chorus had found its way into the mouth an everyman in the local bar of the mind, recounting the inner life of America from the assassination of Kennedy to catastrophe of Katrina. I of the Storm is a talk poem of the long dark night of the soul. Lavender’s unrelenting colloquial yarn weaves a spell in breathlessly extended lines of vivid verse that refuse to give up, against all odds.
—Charles Bernstein
I of the Storm is Bill Lavender’s brilliant personal aftermath mayhem of disconnected thought blowing off teh charts, all bubbling, frothy boards and nails and mental debris overflowing the body of poetry, which examines itself for signs of liife, while continuing to row through cold black water towards a solitary stranger stranded on a roof.
—Charles Borkhius
The Storm questioned every I with its devastating Eye and how this I met that gaze is the story we are all going to write for a long time to come. Bill Lavender’s centrifuge spins his I in his own lyric and indispensible language.
—Andrei Codrescu
Bill Lavender’s poetry is at once in and on and from and for the current storms: Katrina, the Bush administration, the new bar on the block. A mongrel mix of juicy gossip and Slavoj Zizek, southern yarn is sizegenetics spring loaded and New York school irony, paranoia and anti-pastoral, rootedness and road trip, drunkenness and sheer sobriety. There could be no better I than Bill Lavender’s to assimilate so much raw, often rank, detail. This is a crucial, home-made poetry of witness; miss it at your peril.
—Susan M. Schultz
About the Author
Bill Lavender is the director of the Low Residency Creative Writing program and Managing Editor of UNO Press. He is adjunct Assistant Professor of English.
Mr. Lavender’s most recent book of poetry is Transfixion, published in 2009 by Trembling Pillow and Garret County Presses. Poems from this book have been published online in E*Ratio and Fieralingua, and in print in YAWP, Fell Swoop, and Prairie Schooner. Books also include I of the Storm (Trembling Pillow 2006), While Sleeping (Chax Press 2004), look the universe is dreaming (Potes and Poets 2002), and Guest Chain (Lavender Ink 1999). He is currently editing a volume of creative responses to Arakawa and Gins, has been a guest editor at Exquisite Corpse and Big Bridge, and has edited an anthology, Another South: Experimental Writing in the South, from University of Alabama Press (2003). His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous print magazines including Praire Schooner, Jubilat, New Orleans Review, Gulf Coast Review, Skanky Possum, YAWP, and Fell Swoop, and web publications including Exquisite Corpse, E•ratio, CanWeHaveOurBallBack, Moria, Big Bridge, and Nolafugees. He has published scholarship in Poetics Today and Contemporary Literature.
Other Books By Bill Lavender
- Memory Wing (Black Widow Press, 2011)
- A Field Guide to Trees (Foothills Press, 2011)
- 31 Poems: The Katrina Series (Lavender Ink, 2006)
- Another South: Experimental Writings from the South (Editor), (Univ. of Alabama, 2003)
- While Sleeping (Chax Press, 2004)
- Look The Universe is Dreaming (Potes and Poets, 2002)
- Guest Chain (Lavender ink, 1999)