An exhilarating collection of the award-winning poetry that helped establish Ben Lerner as one of the most searching, ambitious and formally inventive writers working today

This book brings together for the first time Ben Lerner's three acclaimed volumes of poetry, along with a handful of newer poems, to present a decade-long exploration of the relationship between form and meaning, between private experience and public expression. No Art is an exhilarating argument both with America and with poetry itself, in which online slang is juxtaposed with academic idiom, philosophy collides with advertising, and the language of medicine and the military is overlaid with echoes of Whitman and Keats. Here, clichés are cracked open and made new, made strange, and formal experiments disclose new possibilities of thought and feeling. No Art confirms Ben Lerner as one of the most searching and ambitious poets working today.

"No Art is a feast comprising form-defining modern prose poems, intellectual ease, and a distinctive style in fusing sound with vivid imagery and structure, humour with sadness" - Daily Telegraph

"Lerner is funny and smart, and his high-wire sequences are a pleasure to read" - Irish Times

"Dealing mostly in intricately patterned sequences and variations [... Lerner's] prose poems allow for moments of grace and insight... There is added colour and weight to Lerner's thought, a more discursive, personal tone, less fractured through formal constraint or interruption, and the increasingly oppressive presence of the future, of ideas and posterity and survival, supply a gravitas and vulnerability which suits his voice and concerns. It bodes well for whatever Ben Lerner does next" - TLS