The Lights: Poems

Longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize
A New Yorker Essential Read
Named a Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, Vulture, NPR, Financial Times, The Telegraph, and Electric Literature

A formally ambitious and intensely felt new volume from the author of 10:04 and The Topeka School.

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.

Ben Lerner is the author of seven previous books of poetry and prose, as well as several collaborations with visual artists. The recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among many other honors. He is a distinguished professor of English at Brooklyn College.