The Lights: Poems [Paperback]

Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize
ANew YorkerEssential Read
Named a Best Book of the Year byThe Washington Post,Vulture,NPR,Financial Times, The Telegraph,andElectric Literature

A formally ambitious and intensely felt new volume from the author of10:04andThe Topeka School.

The Lightsis 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 Lightsregisters 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 Lerners poems ultimately communicatein their unpredictability, in their intensitiesthe promise of mysterious sources of lift and illumination.

Ben Lerneris the author of seven previous books of poetry and prose, as well as several collaborations with visual artists. 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, among many other honors. He is a distinguished professor of English at Brooklyn College.

In the Lerner ofThe Lights, you have it all: love and empathy, newly emerged; a poet's genius for metaphor; and, above all, the strategy of comedy.
Cal Bedient,Lana Turner

Lerners technical skill has stayed with him, but the new groundedness allows for a poetry that is more sensory, and more gentle, while still allowing the speaker to project big thoughts about the world . . . Lerner begins in his own personal space, that familiar self, but begins imagil£‡