In conversation with the writer Maggie Nelson while promoting his last novel, “The Topeka School,” Ben Lerner casually described the miracle of speech: “You can vibrate these columns of air and suddenly some part of consciousness becomes shareable.” A similar dynamic plays out in Lerner’s poetry and prose, where the mere act of speaking sometimes resembles man’s discovery of fire, a revelation that leaves the speaker agog at his accomplishments, which can themselves only evidence powers beyond his own. Indeed, for all the encyclopedic allusions crisscrossing throughout his oeuvre — the minimalist art of Donald Judd, the scourge of high school debate, the pleasures of working at a local (and famous) Brooklyn cooperative grocery store, the shameful condition of White masculinity — he returns most often to speech itself. In Lerner’s works, we see how producing speech, an act we take for granted, has shaped the conditions of modern life, engendering precarity and wonder, paranoia and disbelief.
