Mean Free Path - Ben Lerner

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n nLerner [is] among the most promising young poets now writing.--Publishers Weeklyn nSharp, ambitious, and impressive. --Boston Reviewn nNational 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.n nYou startled me. I thought you were sleeping nIn the traditional sense. I like looking nAt anything under glass, especially nGlass. You called me. Like overheard nDreams. I'm writing this one as a woman nComfortable with failure. I promise I will never nBut the predicate withered. If you are nUncomfortable seeing this as portraiture nClose your eyes. No, you startledn nBen Lerner is the author of three books of poetry and was named a finalist for the National Book Award for his second book, Angle of Yaw. He holds degrees from Brown University, co-founded No: a journal of the arts, and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.n