Location and other works by Hank Lazer

Hank Lazer was born and raised in San Jose, California. His work has been nominated for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize and the 2004 Forward Prize, and won the 2003 Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry from the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has published 14 books of poetry, including The New Spirit (Singing Horse, 2005), Elegies & Vacations (Salt, 2004), and Days (Lavender Ink, 2002). Lazer has given poetry readings and talks in the United States, France, Canada, the Canary Islands, China, Mexico, and Spain. With Charles Bernstein, he edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press. In addition, Lazer is a noted critic of modern and contemporary poetry and the author of Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays, 1996-2008 (Omnidawn 2008). He is a Professor of English at the University of Alabama where he is also an administrator serving as the Associate Provost for Academic Affairs.

 

Everywhere

from here ministries
of death feel
distant almost invisible

governmental orchestrations camouflaged
men & women
passing from shock

& awe into
yet another morphing
of the war

on terror carrying
terror with them
squadron commander of

the drones the
bunker bombs the
reassuring leaflets among

car bombs booby
traps nightmares until
wreckage touches everywhere

 

Pupil

absence an aperture
pupil opening pin
hole to image

this world up
side down take
it in lit

through bare eye
to see to
seize upon kindle

if you what
kind of world
when thanking or

thinking tangible ground
zero simple fact
of being returning

warming this bare
eye through which
love may light

Location

i really am
a writer google
me if you

want to a
poem is a
moment of location

a body a
boy's body huddled
on a bridge

or an old
doctor having to
say it i

am i am
etcetera a location
without pretense ethic

word by word
lord have mercy
hammering it home