The Lights

In a muted and heartfelt collection that alternates between poems and prose pieces, Lerner (Mean Free Path) brings new life to familiar fixations: the mediation of experience, contemporary art, fatherhood, and the poet’s role as conduit for both individual desire and collective action. The political imbricates with the poetic (“how to deliver the news/ in a form that dissolves it into feeling”), while syntax and linear narrative are interrupted or twisted just beyond sense to thrilling effect: “a turn of phase, a change of phrase, slippages” that “release small energy and the harvest falls to me.” The work’s occasional opacity is an argument for the significance of that which is difficult or impossible to express, supporting the idea that “the ideal is visible through its antithesis.” In “Triptych” and “The Dark Threw Patches Upon Me Also,” the details of daily life as a father of young daughters during a pandemic appear alongside reflections on Walt Whitman, painting, and the “desire to arrive/ at identity through dissolution.” Global and personal crises are cast into a gallery of mirrors, the poems unfolding in a series of echoes and reflections between polarities of experience. 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.” (Sept.)