The Lights

"Ben Lerner’s writing shatters space, time and literary borders . . . [His] language [is] nearly synesthetic. You can taste it in your mouth." —David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

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 and 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.