Mean Free Path

Starred review from March 22, 2010
Lerner is both a favorite among young avant-garde poets and a recipient of more traditional honors—his previous book was a finalist for the National Book Award. In his third collection, which is composed of two alternating sequences, he continues and deepens his exploration of how contemporary mass culture taints language, testing the border where words transition from expressing real feeling to being so overused they mean almost nothing. The nine-line stanzas of “Mean Free Path” utilize collage, found language, humor, and snippets of what seem like autobiography to question how much a poem can really say. “I'm sorry, sorrier/ Than I can say on such a tiny phone.” Stunningly prescient insights (“In total war, the front is continuous”) alternate with humorous asides and haunting admissions of the limits of interpersonal connection, noting “the sudden suspicion the teeth/ In your mouth are not your own, let/ Alone the words.” The page-long “Doppler Elegies” utilizes many of the same techniques in an attempt to construct a fragmentary love poem to “Ari.” Promising sentences are cut off at the line break, only to resume in the midst of another, entirely different thought, often creating pertinent juxtapositions, as in a poem that laments “The life we've chosen/ from a drop-down menu.” Lerner keeps refining his techniques and remains a younger poet whose work deserves attention.

May 15, 2010
"Written with my nondominant hand/ In the crawlspace under the war," the long poem sequences in Lerner's third collection (after "Angle of Yaw") attempt to reconstruct the idea of deconstruction by stitching together fragmentsof the post-9/11 world, a friend's suicide, the fraught distances inside intimacy as well as intimacies contained within distanceinto a fragmented whole filled with alternate selves and parallel lives. The glass we see through darkly shatters, glues itself back into semblance, shatters again. This work (whose title refers to the average distance a subatomic particle travels before colliding with another particle) is a critique of the ways we've learned to see by not seeing, by diverting our vision to "the pleasures of]point and click." With alternating sections of 36 and 24 parts, respectively ("Mean Free Path" and "Doppler Elegies"), the book can be read both as love poem and as "preemptive elegy." VERDICT One of the pleasures here is how words are used in a Dickinsonian mannerlike salty packages to be unwrapped, each containing a "finite infinity." The book needs a heroic reader, but persistence does pay off; what at first might seem like mumbo jumbo ends up casting an authentic spell: "With my nondominant hand/ I want to give/ in a minor key/ the broadest sense." Highly recommended.Susan Kelly-DeWitt, Univ. of California, Davis

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