PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Ben Lerner, who the New York Times Magazine has called 'the most talented writer of his generation,' is the author of seven previous books of poetry and prose, as well as collaborations with visual artists. The poems in The Lights are in conversation with-and often contain the seeds of-his acclaimed essays and novels. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College.
Ben Lerner's poems are remarkable for their graceful, trenchant exploration of aesthetics, politics, voice, address, music, and structure -- Maggie Nelson At long last we have the deep pleasure of reading a new book of poems by Ben Lerner. The Lights continues his boundless innovative vocal range: the lyrical, the fictive, the confessional, and the apostrophe, are seamlessly braided in this exhilarating collection. The Lights is Lerner's most personal and important book to date -- Peter Gizzi I look forward to Ben Lerner's poetry the way I used to anticipate a new record by my favourite band. He can be painfully funny and urgently serious in the same poem, self-excoriating and intellectually generous -- Luke Kennard Ben Lerner's poems are brilliant. Again and again they decode and recode the daily mysteries. The questing intelligence and ironist's wink are underpinned by a real moral force -- Nick Laird Steeped in a tradition stretching back to the origins of the poetic tradition in English, Lerner's speakers wander a perpetually twilit cityscape, contemplating the poets' complicity in the prosodies of political entropy, American empire, death-drive capitalism - these poems are haunting, gloaming, blue. -- Stephanie Sy-Quia I was deeply moved by The Lights. Reading the poems felt like an encounter with an archive of a beloved, where fragments can affect a startling power, and within the more seemingly ordinary texts - 'glimmers of empathy', 'exuberance and flatness', a new 'experience of language' - I found exactly what I needed. -- Amy Key
