Another South: Experimental Writing in the South

by Bill Lavender (Contributor), Hank Lazer (Introduction), Lorenzo Thomas (Contributor)

Gathers the best work of flourishing but often-neglected avant-garde southern poets

Another South is an anthology of poetry from contemporary southern writers who are working in forms that are radical, innovative, and visionary. Highly experimental and challenging in nature, the poetry in this volume, with its syntactical disjunctions, formal revolutions, and typographic playfulness, represents the direction of a new breed of southern writing that is at once universal in its appeal and regional in its flavor.

Focusing on poets currently residing in the South, the anthology includes both emerging and established voices in the national and international literary world. From the invocations of Andy Young’s “Vodou Headwashing Ceremony” to the blues-informed poems of Lorenzo Thomas and Honorée Jeffers, from the different voicings of John Lowther and Kalamu ya Salaam to the visual, multi-genre art of Jake Berry, David Thomas Roberts, and Bob Grumman, the poetry in Another South is rich in variety and enthusiastic in its explorations of new ways to embody place and time. These writers have made the South lush with a poetic avant-garde all its own, not only redefining southern identity and voice but also offering new models of what is possible universally through the medium of poetry.

Hank Lazer’s introductory essay about “Kudzu textuality” contextualizes the work by these contemporary innovators. Like the uncontrollable runaway vine that entwines the southern landscape, their poems are hyperfertile, stretching their roots and shoots relentlessly, at once destructive and regenerative. In making a radical departure from nostalgic southern literary voices, these poems of polyvocal abundance are closer in spirit to "speaking in tongues" or apocalyptic southern folk art—primitive, astonishing, and mystic.
 

Genres: Poetry

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Bill Lavender is a poet, novelist, musician, carpenter and publisher living in New Orleans. He is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry—most recently, city of god—and a novel trilogy, Three Letters. He is also the publisher at Lavender Ink/Diálogos. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in dozens of print and web journals and anthologies, with theoretical writings appearing in Contemporary Literature and Poetics Today, among others.

His ground-breaking verse memoir, Memory Wing, dubbed by Rodger Kamentetz "a contemporary autobiographical masterpiece," was published by Black Widow in 2011. His novel, Q, a neo-picaresque view of the surreal world of the future, appeared from Trembling Pillow in 2013. A chapbook, surrealism, was published in 2016 by Lavender Ink. His Amazon author page lists most of his books.

Read an interview with Bill about his poetics and about the press at Jacket2.

He is the co-founder, with Megan Burns of Trembling Pillow Press, of the New Orleans Poetry Festival.

Reviews

[Michael Edgerton]

Wonderful anthology that proves that poetry currently being written in the "South" is not exhausted by the label "agrarian," but is just as smart, cosmopolitan, and diverse as anywhere else in the country. Lavender has done a great job and a great service to American poetry in producing this anthology.