ANGLE OF YAW - BEN LERER

I have had a bit of a phobia or fear of Napoleon Dynamite Syndrome w/r/t Lerner because I only really know him from his autofiction. And I only know about it because people love it and you read/hear about it often. Since what I gathered from this conversation left me with the impression that he was a wunderkind poet who is from Kansas and lived in Spain and who writes small books that are technically fiction but about his life, and that sounded not for me. Pass. But at some point I had read one of his poems and wondered if his poetry was actually good and saw that this collection seemed like the favorite and that my library carries it. Anyway, it is good. There are 3 sections here, the first and the last are more formally poetry, with clear lines and whatnot. The middle section consists of short prose-poems that were my favorite part of the book. There are some real bars. I enjoyed, “"Even in death, the old debate between / depth and surface: some poets attach weights to their ankles, others just / float facedown.” and “If you have to buy a ticket, it’s modern. If you are already inside and have to pay to get out of it, it’s more modern. If you can be inside of it without paying, it’s a trap.” There’s lots of great stuff about the vertical and the horizontal, including a great image of a marching band forming a shape that can only be seen from above, but being filmed and placed on a screen so the audience can see, “The displacement of the God-term by the masses” which also plays into his investigation about how reading a book makes you assume a position of shame with your head down. Which seems a bit undercut by our phones and how they change our posture, but it’s an interesting line of thinking either way. I’m not sure I’m going to pick up any of his novels, they still seem like something that I wouldn’t really like, but I was pretty impressed by some of these poem.