RaveZYZZYVABen Lerner’s first novel is a fascinating and often brilliant investigation of the distance (or the communication) between experience and art … He claims again and again, to the reader and to the other characters, that poetry isn’t about anything, and that any time the word ‘poet’ comes up to describe him it is a derogatory or unjust description, as if Adam were always out-of-body, always seeing himself from across the room … We zoom from the relatively singular experience of the poet struggling with his own value system to a contemporary examination of ‘experiencing’ disaster or war second-hand. The perpetual numbness Adam has felt during most of the novel becomes a quality shared by society at large when it follows traumatic events on the news.
