Category: Textual Poetry
When the Time Comes
(Dos Madres Press, 2022) A book-length meditation on the final weeks of the poet’s mother, Wendy Lazer, Hank Lazer’s When the Time Comes offers a clear-eyed witnessing of the dissolving of a life. As in the Zen priest Joan Halifax’s book title, Being with Dying, Lazer’s poems attempt to do just that:…
field recordings of mind in morning
Inter(ir)ruptions
(Generator Press, 1992) Charles Bernstein on Inter(ir)ruptions: “To be is to be interrupted” (interpreted) might be the motto of Hank Lazer’s novel series of poetic investigations titled Inter(ir)ruptions. Everyday life is hysterical, or hysterically ruptured with excruciating, often hilarious, detail or detritus or do you know another way to…
Deathwatch for My Father
By Diamond Head
Doublespace: Poems 1971–1989
(Segue Books, 1992) “DOUBLESPACE is a noble attempt to bridge the chasm between Language poetry and the traditional anectdotal and meditative poetry of the ‘free form’ mode. Free form poetry communicates in diciplined, conversational speech, one of its important princples. Language poetry defies this principle and goes about its…
3 of 10: H’s Journal, Negation and Displayspace
Elegies & Vacations
(Salt Publishing, 2004) A book of intense emotional power, Elegies & Vacations marks Hank Lazer’s taking the resources of innovative poetry in new directions that are at once elegiac, skeptical, and spiritual. Eleven poems, no two alike, Elegies & Vacations is an ambitious attempt, in the words of Robert Duncan, “to recreate…
The New Spirit
When the Time Comes

(Dos Madres Press, 2022) A book-length meditation on the final weeks of the poet’s mother, Wendy Lazer, Hank Lazer’s When the Time Comes offers a clear-eyed witnessing of the dissolving of a life. As in the Zen priest Joan Halifax’s book title, Being with Dying, Lazer’s poems attempt to do just that:…
field recordings of mind in morning
Inter(ir)ruptions

(Generator Press, 1992) Charles Bernstein on Inter(ir)ruptions: “To be is to be interrupted” (interpreted) might be the motto of Hank Lazer’s novel series of poetic investigations titled Inter(ir)ruptions. Everyday life is hysterical, or hysterically ruptured with excruciating, often hilarious, detail or detritus or do you know another way to…
Deathwatch for My Father
By Diamond Head
Doublespace: Poems 1971–1989

(Segue Books, 1992) “DOUBLESPACE is a noble attempt to bridge the chasm between Language poetry and the traditional anectdotal and meditative poetry of the ‘free form’ mode. Free form poetry communicates in diciplined, conversational speech, one of its important princples. Language poetry defies this principle and goes about its…
3 of 10: H’s Journal, Negation and Displayspace
Elegies & Vacations

(Salt Publishing, 2004) A book of intense emotional power, Elegies & Vacations marks Hank Lazer’s taking the resources of innovative poetry in new directions that are at once elegiac, skeptical, and spiritual. Eleven poems, no two alike, Elegies & Vacations is an ambitious attempt, in the words of Robert Duncan, “to recreate…