On January 6, 2021 — the day of the Capitol insurrection — Bill Lavender opened Saint Augustine's City of God and began to write. He did not stop for 1,461 days.
city of god is the book-length poem that resulted: a day-by-day reckoning with a nation at the brink, composed as a “distracted reading of a dubious translation” of Augustine's fifth-century defense of Christianity against the charge that it had brought about the sacking of Rome. Section by section, the poem plays against the saint's text — but where Augustine is brash and polemic, Lavender is elegiac and compassionate, and the two cities, the ancient and the American, the City of God and the city of “ungod,” bleed into one another.
Across four years the poem gathers everything the days delivered: Christian Nationalism and bitcoin, TikTok and the Q conspiracy, the war in Ukraine, the long shadow of New Orleans — and, returning each morning, the one-armed woman who greets the poet at his car, holding an unlit cigarette, talking about Jesus. It is, by turns, incisive cultural critique and erudite lyric meditation: serious political poetry that revives the spirit of the great verse satirists while never losing its tenderness for “this city of souls / ruled solely by / the lust to rule.”
“city of god stands as one of the richest, most experimental and authentic chronicles of our time.”
Rodrigo Toscano, author of WHITMAN.CANNONBALL.PUEBLA.“Lavender writes with rage and empathy into his own, and his nation's, last days.”
Susan M. Schultz, author of I and Eucalyptus“A wonderful antidote to the delirium of our epoch — a model of how to stay alive, present, and creative under pressure.”
Laura Mullen, author of EtC“Serious political poetry, not slogan-ridden protest… it wields both scorn and deep insight, reviving the spirit of the great satirists — Juvenal, Martial & Co.”
John Taylor, author of What Comes from the Night“In place of a pontificating saint we have a plain-speaking New Orleans poet reflecting, soberly and gorgeously, on a world again at the brink. A truly astonishing work.”
Norman Fischer, author of There was a clattering as…“A dexterously textural, poignantly pivotal, ‘hurricane of passions.’”
Adeena Karasick, author of Ærotomania: The Book of Lumenations“Erudite, jazzy, perhaps sinful, this is the modern polis's earnest riposte to the creator of ‘original sin.’”
Peter Thompson, translator of Fernando Arrabal's Letter to General Franco“No one has ever blended rage and empathy more eloquently.”
Rodney Jones, author of Salvation Blues and Alabama“There are a few books I find so engaging I never want them to end, which was my experience with city of god.... I can hardly think of something of import that you didn't touch on in this book.”
Susanne Dyckman, author of A Dark Ordinary
Bill Lavender is a poet, editor, and publisher who has lived and worked in New Orleans since 1975. He is the founder of Lavender Ink, a press devoted primarily to poetry, and its imprint Diálogos, which publishes mostly literature in translation. He is also co-founder of the New Orleans Poetry Festival.
The author of fourteen books of poetry and a novel, he has spent his career at the intersection of writing, translation, and independent publishing. city of god — written across the four years between the January 6th insurrection and the certification of the 2024 election — is his most ambitious work to date.