Bill Lavender - MEMORY WING
Please join us for a reading and signing with Bill Lavender featuring his new book, MEMORY WING, a memoir in verse that explores the outer reaches of truth: of memory, language and art.
"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, Bill Lavender takes us back, down, deep into a psychological Arkansas and New Orleans that resonate with Dante's three part journey. In the field of felt memory, he guides us into territories of torment, recognition and reconciliation that are his equivalents of Dante's inferno, purgatory and paradise. Memory Wing is a contemporary autobiographical masterpiece."
—Rodger Kamenetz"What a grand concerto! Read this epic eulogy and weep! Lavender is a resplendent Virgil traversing the woods of his memory, which coincides at unexpected places with our own. I'm 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."
—Andrei Codrescu
Loosely based on the tripartite structure of
The Divine Comedy, this poem appears as a simple memoir in lyrical and
immediately accessible language, yet it works by accumulation to
question the very fact of memory and the foundations of truth and
identity. This is a poem that reads as easily as a memoir but which is
as dense with allusion as one of The Cantos.
Bill Lavender is a poet, editor, and teacher at the University of New Orleans. He grew up in Fayetteville, Arkansas but has spent most of his adult life in New Orleans. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including I of the Storm, which includes passages on the Katrina disaster, and an innovative book of short poems, While Sleeping. He also edited the ground-breaking anthology, Another South: Experimental Writing in the South, from University of Alabama Press. His poems and stories have appeared in dozens of print and web journals and anthologies, and his essays and theoretical writings have been published in Contemporary Literature and Poetics Today, among others.
Memory Wing (Paperback)
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: Black Widow Press, 12/2011
- Street:
- 513 Octavia St
- City:
- New Orleans ,
- Province:
- Louisiana
- Postal Code:
- 70115-2055
- Country:
- United States
