Hank Lazer author of Slowly Becoming Awake is interviewed by Jake Marmer in Tablet’s Arts and Culture section:
“I’m a Jew and a Buddhist living in the Deep South. I feel compelled to define what that means. If I lived in Brooklyn I wouldn’t have needed to affirm that,” said poet Hank Lazer early this year, smiling, as we sat in the cozy, colorful study at his home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. If Brooklyn and Berkeley are the diaspora, then Tuscaloosa, one would imagine, is the diaspora’s diaspora, a designation that is less physical than poetic and spiritual, a place where identity is inevitably dialectical. As Lazer told me, it was in Alabama over the past few decades that he found himself “turning toward phenomenology of the spiritual experience … not a fixed-state thing but a kind of oscillation, movement in and out of spiritual awareness of something that matters, something other than our specific, superficial identity.” (read more here)
