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Product Info
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Author: Ben Lerner
ISBN: 9780374613921
Fiction, Poetry
The Lights
by
Ben Lerner
The Lights by
Ben Lerner
Reviews
"This collection vibrates with interiority and intellection, the author's ruminations merging the observational and existential, a swirling chaos he shapes into calm. His writing is similarly bold, at times expressionistic and acrobatic, while in other moments executed with unadorned, plainspoken clarity... Another stunningly audacious work from Lerner that surveys life through the lens of art and vice versa, intimate and universal, challenging but deeply rewarding."
Library Journal
Summary
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.
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post.
