The Lights

July 24, 2023
In a muted and heartfelt collection that alternates between poems and prose pieces, Lerner (Mean Free Path) brings new life to familiar fixations: the mediation of experience, contemporary art, fatherhood, and the poet’s role as conduit for both individual desire and collective action. The political imbricates with the poetic (“how to deliver the news/ in a form that dissolves it into feeling”), while syntax and linear narrative are interrupted or twisted just beyond sense to thrilling effect: “a turn of phase, a change of phrase, slippages” that “release small energy and the harvest falls to me.” The work’s occasional opacity is an argument for the significance of that which is difficult or impossible to express, supporting the idea that “the ideal is visible through its antithesis.” In “Triptych” and “The Dark Threw Patches Upon Me Also,” the details of daily life as a father of young daughters during a pandemic appear alongside reflections on Walt Whitman, painting, and the “desire to arrive/ at identity through dissolution.” Global and personal crises are cast into a gallery of mirrors, the poems unfolding in a series of echoes and reflections between polarities of experience. Readers are left with a gorgeous artifact of impasse between “lyric and epic,” and a mournful yet exuberant catalogue of “darker ruminations tinged with gold.”

September 1, 2023
Best known for his novels, including The Topeka School (2019), Lerner has published three previous volumes of poetry. He has received a Fulbright, a Guggenheim, and a MacArthur, and he's been a finalist for prestigious book awards. Perhaps the best praise of all is when critics announce that they have canceled their dinner plans to stay home to read his latest release. Lerner appears to be on to something, one might call it the zeitgeist: "the new-old decadence / The fast-slow time of it / The arriving early of lateness." Readers will get a sense here of utterly contemporary feelings and insecurities, expressed in a rich scientific and pseudo-scientific diction, and they will learn why UFOs remain such a curious and durable symbol of intimacy. Lerner may be the Wes Anderson of poetry; his prose poems and verse are written in a style both searching and recursive, as if travel on earth and in outer space were like circling an airport. These poems are on the way to a destination while remaining firmly committed to never arriving.

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Starred review from September 1, 2023

Despite finding his most commercial success with a trio of fiction works published during the 2010s (including 2019's The Topeka School)--this after three verse collections--Lerner has always considered himself a poet first and foremost. Fittingly, here he marries prose and poetry more purposely than before, blurring the boundaries of form and reflexively experimenting with various modes across the collection: "I completed my study of form/ and forgot it." Regardless of the shape it takes, Lerner's writing is as erudite as ever, once again taking as locus the intersection of life and art and particularly the nature of poet and poetry: "you've probably felt that a spirit is at work in the world, or was, and that making it visible is the artist's task, or was." As in all of Lerner's work, 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. VERDICT Sometimes it can feel like a tale of two works, the junction not quite seamless, with some of the poetry here feeling a bit more academic and opaque next to the thrilling prose. But on the whole, this is another stunningly audacious work from Lerner that surveys life through the lens of art and vice versa, intimate and universal, challenging but deeply rewarding.--Luke Gorham

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