Transfixion

Description

Bill Lavender

Transfixion

9781891053115 (pbk.) (Trembling Pillow Press)
1891053116

120 pages: $19.95
2009

Bill Lavender’s Transfixion, published by Trembling Pillow in 2009, continues the investigation into the relationship of poetry and trance-like states.

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, its 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 thing immediately.” Keep smiling, keep reading, all your friends are here and then some, though the “ground of imago is fear / a paranoied metropolis”—but we know a parnoid city is a city that 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