Lights

The Lights is a constellation of verse and prose, voice memos and vignettes, songs and silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. These are poems at once alive to the forces that shape human society and to the rhythms of the natural world, to the power of new technologies and the wonder of our timeless planet. Sometimes the scale is intimate and quiet and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the "collectivization of feeling": "I want everybody out there to sing along, even the stones." Written over a span of fifteen years, The Lights records the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises. And, even while alert to the darkness, it is the light in the book that remains, in dusk, in images from space, in old poems, in power cuts, in the flickering connections between people. From one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, the poems in this collection come to us as beacons, the poems in this collection come to us as beacons, illuminating new possibilities of thought and feeling.

Ben Lerner's poems are remarkable for their graceful, trenchant exploration of aesthetics, politics, voice, address, music, and structure, 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, 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

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.