From the author of the bestselling novels Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, here is a dazzling collection of award-winning poetry - available for the first time to readers beyond the US
BEN LERNER was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, and is the author of two internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04. He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw (a finalist for the National Book Award), and Mean Free Path. In 2011, he became the first American to win the Munster Prize for International Poetry. Lerner lives and teaches in Brooklyn.
Ben Lerner's poetry, like his prose, is subject to its own agitated
brilliance. Many would settle for his quickness and reach but
Lerner works in tension with these and resists securing either
himself of the reader. The result is poetry of rare immediacy and
effect
*Lavinia Greenlaw*
Ben Lerner's hilarious, humane poetry is an instrument of
phenomenal sensitivity: a telescope through which unforgettable
images of the interior and exterior worlds are made visible, in the
highest definition
*Oli Hazzard*
I look forward to Ben Lerner's poetry the way I used to anticipate
a new record by my favourite band. He can be painfully funny and
urgently serious in the same poem, self-excoriating and
intellectually generous. For ten years I've gone to his work
whenever I need reminding what's still possible, the expanse we
have to fill, the lack (of subtlety, of life) we all write against.
So many young British poets have already been influenced by his
poetry, but No Art makes it available to a wider audience in the
UK
*Luke Kennard*
Ben Lerner's poems are remarkable for their graceful, trenchant
exploration of aesthetics, politics, voice, address, music, and
structure. For admirers of Lerner's fiction who are just now coming
to his poems, this volume will offer a compelling illustration of
how poetry thinks and pleasures distinctly; for those coming to
Lerner's writing for the first time altogether, an ardent, adamant,
ever-questing poetics awaits you
*Maggie Nelson*
Ben Lerner's poems are brilliant. Again and again they decode and
recode the daily mysteries. The questing intelligence and ironist's
wink are underpinned by a real moral force
*Nick Laird*
No Art is a feast comprising form-defining modern prose poems,
intellectual ease, and a distinctive style in fusing sound with
vivid imagery and structure, humour with sadness
*Daily Telegraph*
Lerner is funny and smart, and his high-wire sequences are a
pleasure to read
*Irish Times*
Dealing mostly in intricately patterned sequences and variations
[... Lerner's] prose poems allow for moments of grace and
insight... There is added colour and weight to Lerner's thought, a
more discursive, personal tone, less fractured through formal
constraint or interruption, and the increasingly oppressive
presence of the future, of ideas and posterity and survival, supply
a gravitas and vulnerability which suits his voice and concerns. It
bodes well for whatever Ben Lerner does next
*TLS*
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