by Ben Lerner
First published 2010
A series of fractured poems pulse across the page like scattered particles, each fragment threatening to collapse into meaning—or disappear entirely. Lerner's third collection disrupts traditional poetic structure, creating a landscape where language itself becomes a precise scientific instrument. These poems track the movement of thought, memory, and perception as they ricochet between intimate personal moments and vast theoretical spaces. Discrete sections emerge and dissolve: a conversation, a mathematical equation, a memory of childhood, a scientific observation. The work interrogates how we construct meaning through language, proximity, and sudden unexpected connections. The collection operates like a quantum system: observations change the observed, lines of text shift when examined, and the reader becomes an active participant in generating potential meanings. Each page is a field of potential, where personal and theoretical intersect with electric unpredictability.
Genres: art, literary-fiction, contemporary, poetry, 21st-century, academic
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: experimental-structure, nonlinear-narrative
96 pages · Paperback · Copper Canyon Press