- Published: 03/11/2016
- ISBN: 9781783782741
- 160x20mm
- 288 pages
No Art
Ben Lerner
This book brings together for the first time Ben Lerner’s three acclaimed volumes of poetry, along with a handful of newer poems, to present a decade-long exploration of the relationship between form and meaning, between private experience and public expression. No Art is an exhilarating argument both with America and with poetry itself, in which online slang is juxtaposed with academic idiom, philosophy collides with advertising, and the language of medicine and the military is overlaid with echoes of Whitman and Keats. Here, clichés are cracked open and made new, made strange, and formal experiments disclose new possibilities of thought and feeling. No Art confirms Ben Lerner as one of the most searching and ambitious poets working today.
£14.99
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
From the Same Author
Ben Lerner on Granta.com
Fiction | Granta 148
The Spread
Ben Lerner
‘He began to feel less like he was delivering a speech and more like a speech was delivering him.’
Read an extract from Ben Lerner’s latest novel, The Topeka School.
Fiction | Granta 139
Bright Circle
Ben Lerner
‘Things he dreamt began to show up in the bushes, the plastic figurine from a parachute firework, the small dull rusted circular saw blade he thought of as a throwing star, and he pocketed those things.’
Poetry
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Granta 120
Dilation
Ben Lerner
‘My role in the slaughter doesn’t disqualify the beauty I find in all / forms of sheltered flame.’