{"id":16105,"date":"2011-01-18T15:01:58","date_gmt":"2011-01-18T21:01:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lavenderink.org\/site\/?post_type=product&#038;p=16105"},"modified":"2026-01-18T15:18:07","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T21:18:07","slug":"memory-wing","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/www.lavenderink.org\/site\/shop\/memory-wing\/","title":{"rendered":"Memory Wing"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lavenderink.org\/site\/books\/bill-lavender\/\">Bill Lavender<\/a><\/h2>\n<h2><i>Memory Wing<\/i><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">9780983707905 (pbk.) (Black Widow Press)<\/p>\n<p><\/span><\/p>\n<p>220 pages: $19.95<br \/>\n2011<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Bill Lavender&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Memory Wing,<\/em> published by Black Widow in 2011, is a poetic autobiography based loosely on <em>The Divine Comedy.<\/em><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p class=\"p1\">Delving with brilliant image precision into the power of the past, chanting in plain lyric to the ghosts of his mother and father and the futurity of his sons,<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>Bill Lavender takes us back, down, deep into a psychological Arkansas<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>and New Orleans that resonate with Dante\u2019s three part journey.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>In the field of felt memory, he guides us into territories of torment, recognition and reconciliation that are his equivalents of Dante\u2019s inferno, purgatory and paradise.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span><i>Memory Wing <\/i>is a contemporary autobiographical masterpiece.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\">\u2014Rodger Kamenetz<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\">What a grand concerto! Read this epic eulogy and weep! Lavender is a resplendent Virgil traversing the woods of<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>his memory, which coincides at unexpected places with our own. I\u2019m happy to see the terse minimal suitcase of his lyrical self unpacked and overflowing. This is a grand American long poem Doc Williams would be proud of.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\">\u2014Andrei Codrescu<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><i>Memory Wing<\/i> transcends and investigates the rich territory between poetry and creative nonfiction, exploring<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0 <\/span>the myriad layers of the poet\u2019s personal experience in a voice that is sometimes humorous, often poignant, and deeply insightful.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\">\u2014Kristen Iversen<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p4\">There is no waiting in the wings here; everything\u2019s laid out on memory\u2019s stage, surreal as the Roman memory exercises ordained. The poet may be left wing, but he steps out from under the wing of Arkansas, Blake-like tragedy, and Dante, into the elegiac present. The OED\u2019s 12th definition best defines wing as \u201dpart of a spectral line where the intensity tails off to nothing at either side of it,\u201d but that fails to describe the utter intensity of the flight between points in this non-fiction epic poem which flies through past, present, and hallucinated futures at the speed of unpunctuated sound.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p5\">\u2014Susan M. Schultz<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p class=\"p4\">Bill Lavender shifts language in rare combinations that unsettle the reader. <i>Memory Wing <\/i> is no different except that it takes a lifetime to inhabit, but lets us dip into that proper distance between knowing and learning where we hold down our own memories for comparison and where we sit in the same tragedy and splendor\u2026.<\/p>\n<p class=\"p5\">\u2014Megan Burns<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Memory Wing, by Bill Lavender (2011)<br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 16px;\">9780983707905<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":16106,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[523],"product_tag":[94],"class_list":{"0":"post-16105","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-by-bill-lavender","7":"product_tag-bill-lavender","9":"first","10":"instock","11":"taxable","12":"shipping-taxable","13":"purchasable","14":"product-type-simple","15":"berocket_lgv_grid","16":"berocket_lgv_list_grid"},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Memory Wing by Bill Lavender (2011)<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"What a grand concerto! Read this epic eulogy and weep! Lavender is a resplendent Virgil traversing the woods of\u00a0 his memory, which coincides at unexpected places with our own. I\u2019m happy to see the terse minimal suitcase of his lyrical self unpacked and overflowing. This is a grand American long poem Doc Williams would be proud of.\u2014Andrei Codrescu\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.lavenderink.org\/site\/shop\/memory-wing\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Memory Wing by Bill Lavender (2011)\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"What a grand concerto! Read this epic eulogy and weep! Lavender is a resplendent Virgil traversing the woods of\u00a0 his memory, which coincides at unexpected places with our own. 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