Primary Work

Mean Free Path, Ben Lerner

“In Mean Free Path, Lerner’s poems assume a panoply of voices and rhetoric that converge in like a spilled-out bag of Skittles. Each line advances until its inevitable collision with another. The importance of delay is emphasized throughout the book, and it is a detail instructive for readers. We are alerted both to delays in the completion of his syntax within the poems — sentences broken by lines from other sentences, “A live tradition broadcast with a little delay” — as well as the importance of our own delay, of slowing the pace of our consumption.” (Daniel E. Pritchard, “In Familiar Ways”, Review of Mean Free Path, The Critical Flame)