New Books by BC Faculty Series: Ben Lerner, “The Lights: Poems”

The event celebrates the publication of Ben Lerner’s latest book, The Lights: Poems.

Lerner, a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, will be joined in conversation by David Grubbs, Distinguished Professor of Music at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, and Celina Su, Marilyn J. Gittell Chair in Urban Studies and Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center.

The Lights: Poems is a constellation of verse and prose, voice mails and vignettes, songs and felt silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. Sometimes the scale is intimate, quiet, and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the animation of our common world. Written over a span of 15 years, The Lights registers the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises, but for all their insight and critique, Lerner’s poems ultimately communicate―in their unpredictability, in their intensities―the promise of mysterious sources of lift and illumination. This event is part of the Wolfe Institute‘s “New Books by BC Faculty” series.