No Art (2016)

'No Art' 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.