My ID by Bill Lavender

Life happened before it was over. Then there is the sorting out that empties into overlaid panes, mind’s planets, which Bill Lavender navigates in My ID with consummate élan and a strong dose of “impolite, unpolitic” dissent.
—Charles Bernstein, author of Near/Miss

Bill Lavender’s My ID traverses a terrain that is at once grounded in the details of an individual life and the collective unconscious, where we cannot always tell if we wake or sleep. Is it an ironic fact that our lives are defined from first to last by Social Security IDs? as the title poem—breath-taking in its condensatory scope—recounts. Koan-like in its dance with the id, as another poem muses: “try to tell the simple truth/ and the repressed slips /out in the accident.” Lavender is both erudite and nonchalant, and that’s a potent blend. It is a rare pleasure to read poems of such frank and capacious vision, encompassing meditations on mortality (that final exile, “the dream from which I will not awaken”), the aesthetic death of the author (“I can say I but / I can [also] disappear”), and the etymology of Police (the tour de force chapbook which closes the volume). Like the carpenter he once was, with My ID Lavender nails it.
—Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth

The subject of My ID is self-sameness and difference: identity (responsive, shifting, and interdependant) and passage, and to read this book is to ride (as passenger) in a state of balanced satisfaction and saudade. “Like Baudelaire,” Bill Lavender tells us, “I was homesick / for places I had never been.” The beauty of this lucid and loving collection is in the fact that the author is at once at home in the world and also a stranger—an eager, hungry traveler—at home. My ID is both poetry and criticism, an extended elegy and a celebration, and a wonderful way to go deep into the world that’s changing around us, moment by moment: where, “Even the ‘born and raised’ are refugees.”
—Laura Mullen, author of Complicated Grief

In My ID Bill Lavender engages and deconstructs the confessional as political act, religious gesture and literary subgenre, all three dovetailing into the Foucault-Derrida-esque essay-poem “La Police.” The overall effect is symphonic—each poem gradually builds toward the epic ruminations of “Tui: An Elegy” before leveling off at the philosophical meditations “Of Dreaming” and “Of Sighing.” My ID is, in the end, a memoir in verse: elegant, wise and enthralling.
—Tyrone Williams, author of As Iz

In the name of our precious identity, our supposed to right to privacy, we rankle at the degree to which life is policed. Lavender’s poetry explores the antagonisms between the “id” and the ID’s which we carry in our wallets. The “id” in its most visceral form emerges, for instance, in tending to the very messy death agonies of a family dog whom one loves with sublime empathy. The “id” and the ID, which is the identity issued by employment, city or state, Olson’s polis, are misaligned in so many senses. It is difficult to make a synthesis that can be identified as “my.” Lavender probes the liminal spaces between these very different conceptions of what it is to be human, using a supple narrative line, whose pauses and clipped rhythms instruct the reader in how to read and indeed how to feel human. The images and narratives that populate these poems are drawn from a trove of memories or recurring dreams that have obsessed the poet. The materials embody narrative and historical synchronicities, spanning swimming off Grand Isle near New Orleans and camping in Galicia. My ID is a serial poem composed of fragments of pilgrimage and rants at the ways in which our nominal lives as citizens have become empty of meaning, despite efforts to find a natural or human balance. Vide the number of times that the poet projects his nude body or intoxicated reveries upon the reader’s consciousness. My ID is compelling reading and will leave you hungry for more glimpses of Lavender’s life and thought.
—Donald Wellman, author of Essay Poems

Bill Lavender’s ID has never been better defined, though there’s some shape-shifting here. Like his other masterwork, Memory Wing, this is a story of identity’s quest and chimaera, but this version also invokes the lame quiddity of its artifacts. While the former work winged over the arc of a life, My ID swims; the river-course of time includes more of the present, more of the quotidian. Sensitivity to animals, to Spanish pueblos, and to other writers wends its own course that bends the speaker’s identity. Where next? we ask one of our finest writers. I’ll be along for the ride.
—Peter Thompson, author of Winter Light

When one refuses to sell out to metaphysical totality mongering, an appetite for the world as it comes to us—not as it should be—begins to grow. Out of this hunger (not a “yearning” nor “hope”), the perplexity of being a civil among civils, becomes a strength, a ground-clearing series of moments from which a refreshed politic asserts itself. Bill Lavender’s My ID houses a metric half ton of such cleared-eyed moments. Here are gritty reflections on his life, his city, his region, and globe. Here the purpose of literature is fished out by chance and persistence, not by “method” or “theory.” Here notions of human equanimity, is sensibly pursued as work, common work. My ID is crack of dawn poetry. What’s on your workbench?
—Rodrigo Toscano, author of Explosion Rocks Springfield

The world of Bill Lavender’s My ID is a world of multitudes, of multiplicity, of multiplication. It is a world intensively and intensely described and identified, a world lived, dreamed, imagined, erased, embraced. Critiques of capital, critiques of poetry, critiques of the universal, of the specific. Memories of love, lovers, of deaths, lives, of birth, rebirth. It is so deeply-felt, even at its most casual moments, the reader is not so much invited in as absorbed. “the world is our desire/reflected we are/responsible for what/happens in the world/as we are for what happens/in our dreams.” And: “Why must I write? Because not to is to be a tourist.” Here is poetry written that demands we enter and breathe.
—Mark Statman, author of Exile Home

It is high time to recognize Bill Lavender for the great writer he is, and this book, My ID, may very well be the book to do so. Perhaps being known as an extraordinary publisher, festival (co)organizer, construction manager, builder, low residency & study abroad developer, and rock ‘n’ roll musician has obscured Bill’s surpassing excellence as a writer—and stay tuned for the release of his three-novel series. My ID manages to blend beautifully Bill’s conceptual inventiveness and political-philosophical insights with great, compelling storytelling. Time for us all to sit down, listen, read, & take notice. Damn right!
—Hank Lazer, author of Slowly Becoming Awake

In My ID Bill Lavender exhibits his Proustian aesthetic of weaving the reader into the poem’s nexus via a series of doors opening deep into memory and its nuances. Whether actual identification cards, chickens or Freud’s couch, Lavender can take any subject and continue to open it up like a nesting doll, each image varied just enough to cause the reader to adjust to scale. And as you travel along these turns and swerves in the lines, take care: For Lavender’s path can suddenly reach swiftly into your heart space churning up the energy of what it means to really peer into life, as seeing and attention are forms of love.
—Megan Burns, author of Basic Programming

Everyone has a repertoire of defenses against actually reading a book of poetry. But open Bill Lavender’s My ID anyway. I guarantee you will be irrevocably glad you did. You might even be delighted, as I was, by various things on every page. Lavender does not play word games, exactly, but rather opens himself up, in a very straightforward way, to the tang and immediacy of ordinary life. He merges with it by means of a clear-eyed testimony, filled with irony and heart. And then the deep humor rises naturally from a Whitman-like care for seeming humdrum details, which turn out to be glowing with mysterious human light.
—Henry Gould, author of In RI

Bill Lavender is a poet, novelist, musician, carpenter and publisher living in New Orleans. For 15 years he worked at the University of New Orleans, as director of the Low Residency MFA program and later as Editor-in-Chief of UNO Press. He founded his own press, Lavender Ink, in 1995, and added the Diálogos imprint, devoted to cross-cultural literatures (mostly in translation), in 2011. He is the co-founder, with Megan Burns of Trembling Pillow Press, of the New Orleans Poetry Festival.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 142 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-352-2