Author(s): Ben Lerner

Poetry

The Lichtenberg Figures, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award for Emerging Poets, is a sonnet sequence that interrogates the relationships between language and memory, violence and form. The book takes its title from the fernlike patterns that sometimes appear (and quickly fade) in the aftermath of a lightning strike.
Lerner's poems mimic and explore the complex juxtapositions of contemporary culture through permutation, repetition, and collage. The vocabulary of academic theory collides with American slang, the idiom of the Old Testament meets the jargon of the Internet, and cliches are cracked open and made new and strange. Throughout this debut, flashes of autobiography, comedy, fury, and critique illuminate an eclectic sensibility that is sometimes in command of, and sometimes commanded by, the power of speech.