'One of the things I love about reading Ben Lerner is the way the books recall each other over the various forms – (prose) poetry, novels and essay – that make up his auto-fictional universe, leaving forever undecidable the dividing line between the autos that functions as a material and the craft of the fiction which shapes it into the different literary forms. Not even the essay, that most sober, least fictional of genres seems exempt, when it stands in close dialogue with the slightly more on-edge musings of the weed-smoking, insecure narrator of Leaving the Atocha Station. In the beginning there would have simply been the poetry of a young, first-time author: Ben Lerner. Then the author-poet became the auto-fictional narrator of the novels loosely based on his life. When Lerner returns to writing a book of poetry with The Lights, including poems that recall the time and place of their genesis familiar to us from the novels, a strange and strangely exciting blurring across reality and fiction, across the voice of author and narrator, takes place. Encountering the echos that resound from one book to another, in whichever direction one reads them, a sense of familiarity for the reader sets in. Amongst all else that is going on in Lerner's books, such as a recurring humorous, self-depricating reflection on the social inheritance of a violent masculinity, the clever but always light reflections on the destructive and reparative force of language, we are left with the simple awareness of the passage of time and the trajectory of an existence. The experience of a body of work that so deeply involves my own sense of living in time - like the films of Richard Linklater, for example - I have always found deeply moving.’ —Swen Steinhauser, Jot Bookshop & Journal

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