Hank Lazer • Book Talk & Signing

Join us for the highlight of Independent Bookstore Day, as we invite our friend Hank Lazer to present on our NEW EVENT STAGE at Ernest & Hadley Booksellers! From 11am to 1pm on Saturday, April 26, Hank will be reading from and discussing his latest work, , as well as discussing the importance of literacy. This event coincides with the height of the Literacy Council of West Alabama's membership drive, aka: the . A portion of the day's sales will go to LCWA, and both events are not only a part of the Indie Bookstore Day celebration, but also the grand opening of E&H Books' new event space and used book annex, located in the brick building directly behind the main shop on 20th Avenue (651 20th Ave, Tuscaloosa, 35401).

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Just released, from , twenty years of essays (2006-2024) on contemporary poetry and poetics exploring spirituality, ethics, and international perspectives through talks and exchanges in China and Cuba, with interviews exploring Lazer’s innovative poetry and poetics. is a companion volume to the simultaneous publication of Abundant Life: New & Selected Poems (Chax Press, 2025).

—From the Foreword by Charles Bernstein:

What the devil is the spiritual and why do those who flaunt it do so much to discredit it? Hank Lazer asks the same about the lyric, as part of his quest, in these essays, interviews, and commentaries, to reclaim lyric and spirit for an active poetics of invention and improvisation. You could also turn this topsy-turvy: Lazer questions the aversion to lyric and spirit in much of the poetry that claims the mantle of the new. In his gentle way, Lazer shows how old hat that can be. In so doing, he shows the “innovative necessity” (Kathleen Fraser’s phrase) of transvaluing “transvaluation”: not letting the transgressions of youth become the shibboleths of old age. There is an urgent politics here, in a time where liberalism’s illiberalism haunts our haunts and bedevils our democratic vistas.

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