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"Writing in tongues." — Pierre Joris
Transfixion, Bill Lavender's sixth collection, extends the inquiry of his earlier books into identity, community, and the slippages between language and reality. The title names both an act and a state: to pierce, and to be held still by what has pierced you. Endorsed by Andrei Codrescu and other major figures in American experimental poetry, the work refuses the current fashions of the field in favor of a register entirely its own. Pierre Joris calls it "writing in tongues."
Transfixion is essential reading for fans of Codrescu and the Exquisite Corpse generation, New Orleans poets, and readers of contemporary American experimental and post‑Language verse.
"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."
Author of No Dog
"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."
Author of Poasis II
"Transfixion might seem a linear development: a new book from an accomplished poet, critic, editor and book designer. But this important new work is a lateral expansion. Lavender's books have always had a way of enlarging our notion of poetry—widening the field where poiesis is played. But here we are indeed transfixed."
Author of Harrison's Word
