(blazeVOX, 2022) With no recollection of how or when he received the beautiful brown leather-bound notebook, Lazer’s P I E C E S is at once a book-length meditation in brief fragments and a response to the first page that had already been written in the found notebook. That…
(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 (BlazeVOX, 2021) is a collaboration between Hank Lazer and Holland Hopson featuring a book and a fifteen-track recording of poetry and music. Videos – field recordings of minds in morning – YouTube or listen to field recordings of mind in morning at Bandcamp …
(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…
(Chax Press, 2003) A handsewn chapbook with letterpress cover, Deathwatch for My Father is a long poem, meditation, and memorial from the poet to his dying father in which Lazer attempts to use the thing he knows, language, in order to reconcile the thing he can’t know, death: “my mind…
Tinfish Press, 2016 Hank Lazer has been traveling to O’ahu for over 30 years to visit his mother; during his stays on the island, he has kept to his writing and Buddhist practice. These four deceptively simple poems, moving down the page in narrow threads, respond to his mother’s loss…
(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…
(Chax Press, 1996) “This will be an exquisite book (not a corpse). Everything about it will delight the eye and please the hand…. Writing sentences of interest comes about at considerable cost. Writers tend to lie about this. ‘This book just wrote itself.’ Only it didn’t. Hank Lazer wrote…
(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…
(Singing Horse Press, 2005) We are confronted in Hank Lazer’s The New Spirit by something like a book-length prayer: a crisis in search of a resolution through language — invocation & meditation — that allows itself & him to speak. If the surface of the work seems radical (& it…