A review in a letter: Hank Lazer's N18 Complete

Dear Hank,

I'm understanding the "(Complete)" part of this title as more than a simple assurance to readers that no original notebook pages have been withheld in the making. The big Completeness of this book in my eyes shows up in a collection that opens space for such completeness--finite, infinite, unfathomable--by gracefully remembering that limits and definitions to that space are impossible.

Every handwritten piece of text in the book represents the completeness of the author's life up until and including the very moment of its inscription--cumulative memories, breath, sight, expectations, forgottens, founds, silences, joys. In this case a hand and pen have more sense for accumulation and wisdom than a typed font clearing its throat as a beginning--a new occasion from all previous occasions fitted in the same font. The millions of possibilities for the curves of a cursive 'r' belong to you as you paint them, and your r's seem happy to remind of or acknowledge the r's of everyone else awake in the "early morning" (9), in the completeness of that/your moment. "they/ every last one/ are/ all his own voice" (13). Every last stroke, letter, fraction of shaking experience of a second. Each written word is past & future collected in a fossil of flowing present/presence/presentness.

Hank, speaking of angels playing harps, do you listen to Joanna Newsom? I remember you saying that you think of listening to music as a kind of reading; I think of listening to Joanna Newsom as a kind of writing poetry--in her book-length songs, in her slice of sounds as I am listening exactly, I hear such exact shapes from her that they seem to make sense of the instantaneous sparking of wires behind my eyes and they seem to make sense of the folding progression into next moment(s). Your book has this effect on me as well. My hearing/reading of these shapes are notes that are complete enough in their fluid selves to represent, for me, the cosyness and strechyness of the infinite: "on the bridge/ to sing with/ the sound of what passes by" (37). The result is a fluctuating--or perhaps simultaneous--sense of terror and peace, gratitude, relinquishment.

Joanna Newsom sings "Never get so attached to a poem you forget truth that lacks lyricism," and to that you respond "written right now" (15).