Like much of Lerner’s work, the book is full of uneasy divisions ... Can be uncannily beautiful ... The flickering between worlds—call it reënchantment—that Lerner seeks is, after all, not merely a game. We might want very badly to be in the presence of people who are gone ... [An] astonishing title poem ... This poet, who has dreamed himself awake, need not choose between the safety of the familiar and the thrill of the alien. To live in the world, his poem tells us, is already to know more than we can say.
In Lerner’s works, we see how producing speech, an act we take for granted, has shaped the conditions of modern life, engendering precarity and wonder, paranoia and disbelief. These concerns are alive throughout his new collection of poetry ... The Lights might be the best showcase for Lerner’s set of themes: Here we find a book caught between the puzzle of prose and poetry, public and private speech, past and present. Lerner is not merely cerebral; he is the rare writer who is hilarious no matter what form he is working in ... Like his earlier work, The Lights leaves me wondering how anyone could come away from Lerner and end up thinking he’s so miserable and mean. It’s clear he is having fun and laughing at himself.
Lerner is a chewy writer, his language nearly synesthetic. You can taste it in your mouth ... He’s also a shape-shifter, moving gracefully between past and present, often within a line or two ... All these voices moving through the overlapping timelines.
t takes a poet to invent characters who argue that 'the voice must be sung into existence.' It takes a novelist to honor so many perspectives, histories and intimacies in one book ... Reminds us that we are one and many.
This volume...sweep[s] easily from found gobbets of debased political rhetoric, through lyric reflection on his young daughters’ adventures in language, to Lerner’s anxieties about the place of poetry in contemporary America ... As allusive and complex, but also as engaged and engaging, as we’ve come to expect from Lerner’s work ... There’s a sense here of meditations ongoing, a voice drawing from everyday life and art...from centuries of poetic precursors, from his daughters’ questions about what he does all day.
Whatever the label, the prose poems represent Lerner at his most engaging: indeed, the trappings of lyric – lineation, rhythm, elaborate sound structure, apostrophe – have never seemed intrinsic to his work.
Lerner may be the Wes Anderson of poetry; his prose poems and verse are written in a style both searching and recursive, as if travel on earth and in outer space were like circling an airport. These poems are on the way to a destination while remaining firmly committed to never arriving.
Sometimes it can feel like a tale of two works, the junction not quite seamless, with some of the poetry here feeling a bit more academic and opaque next to the thrilling prose. But on the whole, this is another stunningly audacious work from Lerner that surveys life through the lens of art and vice versa, intimate and universal, challenging but deeply rewarding.
Muted and heartfelt ... Readers are left with a gorgeous artifact of impasse between 'lyric and epic,' and a mournful yet exuberant catalogue of 'darker ruminations tinged with gold.'
