Trembling Pillow Press

Transfixion

Transfixionby Bill Lavender

$15.00 | 120 pages | 2010 | ISBN: 9781891053115


US Domestic Shipping Only

Bill Lavender’s sixth book continues the investigations of identity and community, language and reality, begun in the earlier books. Andrei Codrescu says brings to fruition processes and forms only hinted at previously. Endorsed by Andrei Codrescu and other vital members of the American poetry community, the book resolutely finds its own way through the current poetic fashions. The language is fresh, the insights compelling—what Pierre Joris calls “writing in tongues…”

Review on Exquisite Corpse

Review on Pierre Joris’s Nomadics blog

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

About the Author

Bill LavenderBill Lavender is the publisher at Lavender Ink.

His 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 (Forthcoming Black Widow Press)
  • 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)