Ben Lerner is the author of three novels, three books of poetry, and numerous critical essays, including the book-length monograph The Hatred of Poetry. The more books of prose he writes, the more clearly a kind of common persona, singular yet plural, emerges across his work: his narrators, whether fictional or not, share some facts of their background with one another, while also writing Lerner’s poems and thinking lines from Lerner’s essays. Together, they—or the plural he, a poet and reluctant novelist, born in Kansas and housed in Brooklyn—sprawl easily across the fiction-nonfiction divide.
Source : Learning to Fight
