city of god by Bill Lavender
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… a stunning poetic record—of our times, and for the ages. This is a masterpiece!
—Cynthia Hogue, author of instead, it is dark
Here’s 326 pages of poems that virtuosically track the seismic political changes roiling below our feet. Here’s Lavender straight up calling it: Christian Nationalism, and its downriver cultural debris. city of god stands as one of the richest, most experimental and authentic chronicles of our time.
—Rodrigo Toscano, author of WHITMAN.CANNONBALL.PUEBLA.
A wonderful antidote to the delirium of our epoch, Lavender’s book offers a model of how to stay alive, present, and creative under pressure.
—Laura Mullen, author of EtC, translator of Stéphanie Chaillou’s something happens
Lavender writes with rage and empathy into his own, and his nation’s, last days.
—Susan M. Schultz, author of I and Eucalyptus
This is serious political poetry, not slogan-ridden protest… and it wields both scorn and deep insight, thus reviving the spirit of the great satirists—Juvenal, Martial & Co.—from the decadent period of the Roman Empire.
—John Taylor, author of What Comes from the Night
city of god plays against Augustine’s text… but in place of a pontificating saint we have a plain-speaking New Orleans poet reflecting, soberly and gorgeously, in his latter years, on a world again at the brink. …. a truly astonishing work.
—Norman Fischer, author of There was a clattering as…
… Lavender’s stunningly prescient august[inian] translation underscores how history, “slurred through centuries,” is cyclic… A dexterously textural, poignantly pivotal, “hurricane of passions.”
—Adeena Karasick, author of Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations
Erudite, jazzy, perhaps sinful, this is the modern polis’s earnest riposte to the creator of “original sin.”
—Peter Thompson, translator of Fernando Arrabal’s Letter to General Franco
No one has ever blended rage and empathy more eloquently.
—Rodney Jones, author of Salvation Blues and Alabama
city of god
by Bill Lavender
$23.95, paperback, 352 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1-968422-02-8
