The Lights
Poems
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize
A New Yorker Essential Read
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Vulture, NPR, Financial Times, The Telegraph, and Electric Literature
A formally ambitious and intensely felt new volume from the author of 10:04 and The Topeka School.
The Lights is a constellation of verse and prose, voice mails and vignettes, songs and felt silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. Sometimes the scale is intimate, quiet, and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the animation of our common world. Written over a span of fifteen years, The Lights registers the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises, but for all their insight and critique, Ben Lerner’s poems ultimately communicate—in their unpredictability, in their intensities—the promise of mysterious sources of lift and illumination.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a muted and heartfelt collection that alternates between poems and prose pieces, Lerner (Mean Free Path) brings new life to familiar fixations: the mediation of experience, contemporary art, fatherhood, and the poet's role as conduit for both individual desire and collective action. The political imbricates with the poetic ("how to deliver the news/ in a form that dissolves it into feeling"), while syntax and linear narrative are interrupted or twisted just beyond sense to thrilling effect: "a turn of phase, a change of phrase, slippages" that "release small energy and the harvest falls to me." The work's occasional opacity is an argument for the significance of that which is difficult or impossible to express, supporting the idea that "the ideal is visible through its antithesis." In "Triptych" and "The Dark Threw Patches Upon Me Also," the details of daily life as a father of young daughters during a pandemic appear alongside reflections on Walt Whitman, painting, and the "desire to arrive/ at identity through dissolution." Global and personal crises are cast into a gallery of mirrors, the poems unfolding in a series of echoes and reflections between polarities of experience. Readers are left with a gorgeous artifact of impasse between "lyric and epic," and a mournful yet exuberant catalogue of "darker ruminations tinged with gold."
