The Lights Poems by Ben Lerner

A formally ambitious and intensely felt new volume from the author of
10:04 and The Topeka School.
Ben Lerner's 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. These are poems at once alive to the real forces at work
in the popular" and "the wind in the poplars," "the blue glow of the screen" and
"the snow blue in the light." 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 fifteenyears, 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, the poems ultimately communicate - in their unpredictability, in
their intensities - the promise of mysterious sources of lift and illumination.

Ben Lerner is 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

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
On Sale: Sep 5/23
5.38 x 8.25 • 128 pages
9780374279219 • $35.00 • CL - With dust jacket
Poetry / American