city of god by bill lavender

Description

Bill Lavender

city of god

9781968422028 (pbk.) (MadHat Press)

320 pages: $23.95
January 15, 2026

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Bill Lavender’s city of god is a poetic reading-through of St. Augustine’s magnum opus with comparisons to contemporary American life and politics. This book-length, 300+ page poem, described as a “monumental epic” by Adeena Karasick and “a masterpiece” by Cynthia Hogue, uses Augustine’s reflections on the sacking of Rome by Alaric in 410 to reflect on the attempted insurrection in Washington in 2021 and other aspects, both personal and political, of the modern world, including the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the history of slavery in the U.S., and the daily struggle of homeless people in the poet’s city of New Orleans. Other poets have compared the work to models as diverse as Dante and Dave Chappelle, Pound’s Cantos and the great Roman satires of Juvenal and Martial.

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…a stunning poetic record-of our times, and for the ages. This is a masterpiece!

-Cynthia Hogue, author of instead, it is dark

 

Here’s 326 pages of poems that virtuosically track the seismic political changes roiling below our feet. Here’s Lavender straight up calling it: Christian Nationalism, and its downriver cultural debris. city of god stands as one of the richest, most experimental and authentic chronicles of our time.

–Rodrigo Toscano, author of WHITMAN.CANNONBALL.PUEBLA.

 

A wonderful antidote to the delirium of our epoch, Lavender’s book offers a model of how to stay alive, present, and creative under pressure.

–Laura Mullen, author of EtC, translator of Stéphanie Chaillou’s something happens

 

Lavender writes with rage and empathy into his own, and his nation’s, last days.

-Susan M. Schultz, author of I and Eucalyptus

 

This is serious political poetry, not slogan-ridden protest… and it wields both scorn and deep insight, thus reviving the spirit of the great satirists-Juvenal, Martial & Co.-from the decadent period of the Roman Empire.

-John Taylor, author of What Comes from the Night

 

city of god plays against Augustine’s text… but in place of a pontificating saint we have a plain-speaking New Orleans poet reflecting, soberly and gorgeously, in his latter years, on a world again at the brink. ….a truly astonishing work.

-Norman Fischer, author of There was a clattering as…

 

…Lavender’s stunningly prescient august[inian] translation underscores how history, “slurred through centuries,” is cyclic… A dexterously textural, poignantly pivotal, “hurricane of passions.”

-Adeena Karasick, author of Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations

 

Erudite, jazzy, perhaps sinful, this is the modern polis’s earnest riposte to the creator of “original sin.”

-Peter Thompson, translator of Fernando Arrabal’s Letter to General Franco

 

No one has ever blended rage and empathy more eloquently.

-Rodney Jones, author of Salvation Blues and Alabama