Photography and meditation are known to facilitate reflection and introspection. They teach us to see both the outer world and the mysterious landscape within. In Nowhere in Place, photographer Christopher Jordan explores the meeting place between meditation and photography and how this mirroring of outer and inner worlds plays upon both the surface of his consciousness and the sensor of his digital camera. Before Jordan ventures outside to make pictures, he spends time in quiet meditation. This is an important process of switching gears from the everyday noise of the cluttered mind to a more serene state of awareness. This reset allows Jordan to see the world in fresh ways, appreciating overlooked details that might escape a mind preoccupied with business-as-usual. The book starts in Tuscaloosa, where Jordan lives. For many, T-town is a place of Southern charms and Alabama football, but, for Jordan, it becomes a visual play of textures, colors, and abstract planes with nary a person in sight. The pictures reveal a placeless solitude within the frame of his camera. The book moves west to Boulder, another college town, where his contemplative eye continues to fix upon unusual shapes, colors, and textures while intersecting with an occasional figure. The book reaches full bloom in India, where the interplay between inner and outer landscapes knows no bounds, as his camera reveals a kaleidoscopic interplay of people, places, and things. Within each locale, Jordan photographed "nowhere" in particular, because, for him, the photograph becomes a place of its own being: a sanctuary for meditation, a record of what is seen and heard and felt, an opportunity to see a place and an image right now. For Jordan, the photograph is a medium of meditation and transcendence, providing a point of intersection where one recognizes our shared, common humanity.

This selected--the first compilation of essays by Hank Lazer following his ground-breaking and much revered two-volume Opposing Poetries--offers twelve years of incisive writing at the intersection of two of the more contentiously debated topics in current letters. Drawing on poetic traditions as seemingly disparate as Language writing and Buddhist poetry, Lazer pursues a way of reading that is rich in the music and spirit of the word, attuning readers to the pleasures and range of possibilities for innovative poetry. In a very accessible writing style, and with flashes of brilliance, Lazer explores and identifies new approaches to the lyric and to the writing of spiritual experience in American poetry of the past one hundred years. In this book of essays, interviews, reflections, and more, Lazer focuses on two topics central to the poetry of our time: the changing nature of beauty in the lyric and the necessity of finding new ways of embodying spirituality. By bringing a wide range of perspectives to his readings--from the jazz of Monk and Coltrane to the philosophy of Heidegger and Derrida--Lazer's essays inspire readers to enter into a renewed and renewing relationship with poetry.

A book of intense emotional power, Elegies & Vacations marks Hank Lazer's taking the resources of innovative poetry in new directions that are at once elegiac, skeptical, and spiritual. Eleven poems, no two alike, Elegies & Vacations is an ambitious attempt, in the words of Robert Duncan, "to recreate the heart of poetry itself." Linking elegies to extended journal-like meditations, Elegies & Vacations asks "what the day may mean." At the heart of the book is a long poem, "Deathwatch for My Father," which tracks the poet's father's final months, testing out the capacities of innovative poetry in the face of the death of a loved one. The book explores relationships with the dead - from the poet's father, to John Cage, to Kenneth Burke, to George Oppen - while also, through family vacations, projecting forward to ask "to what are we ancestral." The opposed or apposed guiding lights of the book - John Ashbery and George Oppen - like the juxtaposed elegies and vacations, offer divergent modes of verbal and ethical grace. Informed by a Buddhist sensibility, as well as by the relativistic thinking of reform (and mystical) Judaism, Lazer's poems move through varying terrains of form, textuality, and geography, from Suzhou (China) to the Abacos (the Bahamas), from Diamond Head (Oahu) to Orono (Maine), from an extended portrait to a journal, from children's stories to a two-columned composition on the nature of literary history.