| Synopsis: |
David Lawrence's speaker is not (always) kind, not (always) sympathetic - often, in fact, narcissistic. And yet. There is the boy who gets beaten up by his mother to become a boxer. There is the poet who goes into business, gets caught up by his own manic destructiveness and lands in the clinker. Do we hate this speaker? Do we sympathize? Is that even important? These poems are at once wry, lucid, lunatic, energetic, pithy, dark. Young man goes to college. Gets a PhD. Goes into business. Screws up BIG TIME. Becomes a boxer (and a male model, to boot). Returns to poetry. Reclaims his life.Former Brooklyn Poet Laureate D. Nurkse remarks, "'I take out a picture of you and argue with it,' writes David Lawrence in Lane Changes. Strange, visceral, knowing voice, voice that turns against itself, defines its destiny only to wriggle out of it, and riveting, haunted tenderness. Lane Changes is volatile: a hilarious anecdote that ends in sudden silence, a half-open wound, a fascinating book." |