Ben Lerner’s The Lights was published September 5 by MacMillan. The poems contained therein are heady, energetic, and totally engaged with the now—our crisis as a nation and the world’s peril. Lerner contextualizes the horrors of our contemporary situation with the life of Whitman and the grass. There is a lot of grass in this book, actually—delicately pulled from the earth with reverence. Yet the weight of his subjects never feels too much as the tonal shifts in the book allow for humor. In the prose poem “The Media,” he writes “And it’s me, Ben, just calling to check in. I’m on my way to pick Marcela up from daycare and wanted to hear about your trip…Give me a call when you can. I’ll be around until the late nineteenth century, when carved wood gives way to polished steel, especially on lake surfaces….” And in the spectacular “Contre-jour,” a sparkly list poem chronicling luminosity of all sorts, Lerner injects, “I wish I’d known//you were a fan of light/I would have same some for you…”
Congratulations, Ben!
Thanks, Denise--just got this in the mail & your take makes me eager to read it.
Posted by: Terence Winch | September 16, 2023 at 08:21 AM