Poetry. National Book Award finalist Ben Lerner turns to science once again for his guiding metaphor. "Mean free path" is the average distance a particle travels before colliding with another particle. The poems in Lerner's third collection are full of layered collisions--repetitions, fragmentations, stutters, re-combinations--that track how language threatens to break up or change course under the emotional pressures of the utterance. And then there's the larger collision of love, and while Lerner questions whether love poems are even possible, he composes a gorgeous, symphonic, and complicated one.

Author Hometown: PITTSBURGH, PA USA



About the author: Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry: MEAN FREE PATH (Copper Canyon Press, 2010); ANGLE OF YAW (Copper Canyon Press, 2006), named a finalist for the National Book Award for his second book; and THE LICHTENBERG FIGURES (Copper Canyon Press, 2004). He holds degrees from Brown University, co-founded NO: a journal of the arts, and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

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