Description

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, cliches 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.

Publisher Review

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 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 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 -- Charlotte Runcie * Daily Telegraph * 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 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 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 Lerner is funny and smart, and his high-wire sequences are a pleasure to read -- John McAuliffe * 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 -- Declan Ryan * TLS *