Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 172
- Language: English
- Date Published: March 2026
- ISBN 978-1-962847-45-2
Praise
I am haunted by these seemingly slight poems. Hank Lazer’s new book sounds a valedictory note but one absent of any melancholy. Instead, it radiates the calmness of “otherside” moments – fugitive, barely glimpsed, rich with the ephemeral. Deeply informed by his practice in Zen Buddhism, these poems attest to a state of being-here that, like a silver bowl filled with snow, holds fullness close; emptiness even closer. They gleam with an uncanny and sustaining clarity. —Patrick Pritchett
In the sequence and lucent chronicle of these poems, Hank Lazer discloses a gorgeous simultaneity: ie the simultaneity of vigilance and miracle. Each event of eye, of mind, or of fingertips here is a Visitation. The Silver Bowl Is Filled with Snow bears faultless witness to the fact that each and every day is innumerable. —Donald Revell
Like Wang Wei, Saigyo, and Su Dongpo before him, Hank Lazer’s recent work — most saliently here in The Silver Bowl Is Filled With Snow — reflects the Zen spirit of quiet, sane, and compassionate reflection. A pleasure to read these poems in an insane world. —Norman Fischer, author of Selected Poems 1980-2013, and The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path.
I finished The Silver Bowl in the early morning earlier this week, which felt like the perfect time to be reading and immersing in it. I found it remarkable that it touches on so many tragedies but it feels so energized, with a pulse on life, on a dharma that is personal but wide and open. —Pearl Kan
Many of the poems in The Silver Bowl are set in rural Alabama, at Hank Lazer’s beloved Duncan Farm, in a landscape of rocks, meadows, cows, gum trees, and stars overhead. Details of everyday life are woven together with explorations of consciousness, time, language- “each word a small black cow.” Hank’s affection spreads out from the cows to the whole planet and all the beings who share it, His generous voice encourages me/the reader to remember that we are all in this together. “We are equal before the light.” —Susan Moon
The Silver Bowl Is Filled with Snow is a lyrical meditation on the beauty found, if we look carefully, in living through each day, even if that beauty is marred by loss and pushes us to “the edge/of understanding.” These poems are prayers, transforming, through the force of their particularized and often idiosyncratic language, the mundane into the extraordinary. Lazer continues to be a master of surprise, crafting lines as little linguistic gifts, and reminding us at every turn, “there is more/we will never/know/even as we/can see it.” —Jacqueline Allen Trimble – Poet Laureate of Alabama. Author of How to Survive the Apocalypse
Excerpt
■
of the three
people in the
story i am
the last one
alive i am
of these arriving
birds their
intricate
wind across
adjacent trees
leaves each
breath & the next
7.28.2024
Author
Hank Lazer has published thirty-six books of poetry, including his most recent, Abundant Life: New & Selected Poems (Chax Press), and As We Vanish from Public View (7 Points Press) and field recordings of mind in morning (with 15 music-poetry tracks with Holland Hopson on banjo – available on YouTube). Along with Abundant Life: New & Selected Poems, Lazer has published a companion volume of essays, poetics, and interviews: What Were You Thinking – Essays 2006-2024 (Lavender Ink). To find out more about Lazer’s various books, learn about talks, readings, and workshops, and see photos of Duncan Farm, see Lazer’s website: https://www.hanklazer.com
