From the celebrated author of The Topeka School, a collection of poetry that is dazzlingly intelligent, moving and speaks directly to our complex times. The Lights is a constellation of verse and prose, voice memos and vignettes, songs and silences, that brings the personal and the collective into startling relation. These are poems at once alive to the forces that shape human society and to the rhythms of the natural world, to the power of new technologies and the wonder of our timeless planet. Sometimes the scale is intimate and quiet and sometimes the poems are sweeping, Orphic experiments in the "collectivization of feeling": "I want everybody out there to sing along, even the stones." Written over a span of fifteen years, The Lights records the pleasures, risks, and absurdities of making art and family and meaning against a backdrop of interlocking, accelerating crises. And, even while alert to the darkness, it is the light in the book that remains, in dusk, in images from space, in old poems, in power cuts, in the flickering connections between people. From one of the most celebrated writers of his generation, the poems in this collection come to us as beacons, illuminating new possibilities of thought and feeling.

'The sharpest and funniest novel I read this year' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday A hilarious, intelligent cult classic, from one of the most celebrated contemporary novelists. Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid. Fuelled by strong coffee and self-prescribed tranquillizers, every day is a fresh attempt to establish a sense of self and an attitude towards his art. Not helped by his imperfect grasp of Spanish, Adam struggles with the underlying suspicion that his relationships, his reactions, even his entire personality are just as fraudulent as his poetry. Yet while his self-obsession runs riot he is at risk of missing the bigger and more urgent things that threaten to change the world around him in sudden and dramatic ways. One of the funniest and best-loved debut novels of contemporary times, Leaving the Atocha Station is a profound exploration of the creative impulse. 'Packed full of gags... Intensely and unusually brilliant' Geoff Dyer, Observer

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.

Shortlisted for the Folio Prize Internationally celebrated by critics and readers alike A dazzling and utterly original novel about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire In the past year, the narrator of 10:04 has enjoyed unexpected literary success, been diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, and been asked by his best friend to help her conceive a child. Now, in a New York of increasingly frequent superstorms and political unrest, he must reckon with his biological mortality, the possibility of a literary afterlife, and the prospect of (unconventional) fatherhood in a city that might soon be under water. In prose that Jonathan Franzen has called 'hilarious... cracklingly intelligent... and original in every sentence', Lerner's new novel charts an exhilarating course through the contemporary landscape of sex, friendship, memory, art and politics, and captures what it is like to be alive right now. 'Brilliant... Contemplative and tender... I doubt I'll read a finer novel this year' - Sunday Telegraph 'Reading Ben Lerner gives me the tingle at the base of my spine that happens whenever I encounter a writer of true originality. He is a courageous, immensely intelligent artist who panders to no one and yet is a delight to read. Anyone interested in serious contemporary literature should read Ben Lerner, and 10:04 is the perfect place to start' - Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Marriage Plot

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his attitude towards art. Fuelled by strong coffee and self-prescribed tranquillizers, Adam's 'research' soon becomes a meditation on the possibility of authenticity, as he finds himself increasingly troubled by the uncrossable distance between himself and the world around him. It's not just his imperfect grasp of Spanish, but the underlying suspicion that his relationships, his reactions, and his entire personality are just as fraudulent as his poetry.

Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of '97. His parents are psychologists, his mom a famous author in the field. A renowned debater and orator, an aspiring poet, and - although it requires a lot of posturing and weight lifting - one of the cool kids, he's also one of the seniors who brings the loner Darren Eberheart into the social scene, with disastrous effects. Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is a riveting story about the challenges of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity. It is also a startling prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the tyranny of trolls and the new right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men.

No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It’s even bemoaned by poets: ‘I, too, dislike it,’ wrote Marianne Moore. ‘Many more people agree they hate poetry,’ Ben Lerner writes, ‘than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore.’ In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defence of the art. He examines poetry’s greatest haters (beginning with Plato’s famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.

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, cliches 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.

"The Lichtenberg Figures," winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, is an unconventional sonnet sequence that interrogates the relationship between language and memory, violence and form. "Lichtenberg figures" are fern-like electrical patterns that can appear on (and quickly fade from) the bodies of people struck by lightning.

Throughout this playful and elegiac debut--with its flashes of autobiography, intellection, comedy, and critique--the vocabulary of academic theory collides with American slang and the idiom of the Old Testament meets the jargon of the Internet to display an eclectic sensibility.

Ben Lerner, the youngest poet ever published by Copper Canyon Press, is co-founder of "No: a journal of the arts." He earned an MFA from Brown University and is currently a Fulbright scholar in Spain.

In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defence of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.

Your body is by God. God preprogrammed you to look great, have outrageous health, and experience incredible happiness. In the human body, God created a perfect design, equipped with all the organs, tissues, and cells necessary for health, production, and reproduction. The problem, asserts Dr. Ben Lerner, is when we as humans interfere with God's design for our bodies. Junk food, high-stress living, and neglecting exercise are just a few of the things we do to hinder our bodies' performance.

In "Body by God, " Dr. Lerner offers a comprehensive plan for getting in touch with our bodies in four areas: nutrition, exercise, stress management, and time management. His "5-in-5" plan is designed to instill the good habits that will lead to optimum health benefits. Readers will learn how to get in shape with 10-minute workouts, reprogram the way they react to stress, and more. "Owner's Manual Tips" give specific ways to apply the material to real life. Our bodies are "fearfully and wonderfully made." With the help of "Body by God, " readers will learn how to achieve the highest level of performance from God's handiwork.

No more dependence on cold medicines, prescription pills, and anti-depressants. With One-Minute Wellness, you will revitalize every area of your well-being. And the bonus fiction story uniquely illustrates the authors' strategies at work in ordinary lives-a terrific motivator as you optimize your own life.

"Lerner [is] among the most promising young poets now writing."-"Publishers Weekly"

"Sharp, ambitious, and impressive." -"Boston Review"

National Book Award finalist Ben Lerner turns to science once again for his guiding metaphor. "Mean free path" is the average distance a particle travels before colliding with another particle. The poems in Lerner's third collection are full of layered collisions-repetitions, fragmentations, stutters, re-combinations-that track how language threatens to break up or change course under the emotional pressures of the utterance. And then there's the larger collision of love, and while Lerner questions whether love poems are even possible, he composes a gorgeous, symphonic, and complicated one.

"You startled me. I thought you were sleeping
In the traditional sense. I like looking
At anything under glass, especially
Glass. "You" called "me." Like overheard
Dreams. I'm writing this one as a woman
Comfortable with failure. I promise I will never
But the predicate withered. If you are
Uncomfortable seeing this as portraiture
Close your eyes. No, "you" startled"

Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry and was named a finalist for the National Book Award for his second book, "Angle of Yaw." He holds degrees from Brown University, co-founded "No: a journal of the arts," and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam's "research" becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by?
In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, "Leaving the Atocha Station" is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle.

Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979, Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry "The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, " and "Mean Free Path." He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Munster fur Internationale Poesie. "Leaving the Atocha Station" is his first novel.

Parallel Movement of the Hands collects five long, serial poems (and prose poems) which John Ashbery left unfinished and will become part of his archive at Harvard University's Houghton Library. 'In-progress and realised' as their editor Emily Skillings puts it, these abundant poems are characteristic of the mature work of this American master, an adept of the glories of American speech, who is alert to its insinuating logics and its wild goose chases through popular culture and secret histories. In these poems, Carl Czerny rubs shoulders with the Hardy Boys, Robert Mapplethorpe and Eadweard Muybridge, all of them integrated into Ashbery's generous, omnivorous forms. 'How could I have had such a good idea?' the poet asks in 'The History of Photography'. So many good ideas, such a wealth of surprising points of departure.

The fifth volume of the Center for Security Policy's National Security Policy Proceedings includes transcripts of remarks by Michelle Van Cleave, Jeff Kueter, Ted Bromund, Mackenzie Eaglen, Mark Groombridge, David Satter and Sarah Stern. It also includes book reviews by Gordon Chang, Clare M. Lopez and Tom Blau.