Bill Lavender's Transfixion

Very pleased to have Transfixion, Bill Lavender’s new book just out from Garrett County & Trembling Pillow Presses, in hand. As I say in the blurb I wrote for Transfixion: “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.”

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

— Pierre Joris

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