Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. 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."
Synopsis
David Lawrence has had a colorful, if checkered life. Though he holds a Ph.D. in literature from CUNY Graduate Center and taught at Hunter College, in 1976 he went into business and within five years became the CEO of several large insurance brokerages on Wall Street. While there, he became a professional boxer and fought on television in venues like Vegas and Atlantic City. He made a movie of his fight career, Boxer Rebellion, which played at the Sundance Film Festival. In 1993 he didn't pay his taxes on a few of his accounts, losing his multimillion-dollar businesses and ending up doing a two-year bid in a Federal Prison Camp. Prior to, during, and subsequent to jail he became a rapper and did three albums. His poems have been published inn many journals over the years, including Folio, Hawaii Review, New Delta Review, and South Carolina Review, and in four previous books: Boxer Rebellion, Steel Toe Boots, Dementia Pugilistica, and Blame It on the Scientists.