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Mean Free Path
“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 sleepingIn the traditional sense. I like lookingAt anything under glass, especiallyGlass. You called me. Like overheardDreams. I’m writing this one as a womanComfortable with failure. I promise I will neverBut the predicate withered. If you areUncomfortable seeing this as portraitureClose 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 a journal of the arts, and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.
“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 sleepingIn the traditional sense. I like lookingAt anything under glass, especiallyGlass. You called me. Like overheardDreams. I’m writing this one as a womanComfortable with failure. I promise I will neverBut the predicate withered. If you areUncomfortable seeing this as portraitureClose 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 a journal of the arts, and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.
96 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2010
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About the author
Ben Lerner
70 books1,637 followersBen Lerner is an American poet, novelist, and critic. He was awarded the Hayden Carruth prize for his cycle of fifty-two sonnets, The Lichtenberg Figures. In 2004, Library Journal named it one of the year's twelve best books of poetry. The Lichtenberg Figures appeared in a German translation in 2010, for which it received the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie" in 2011, making Lerner the first American to receive this honor.
Born and raised in Topeka, which figures in each of his books of poetry, Lerner is a 1997 graduate of Topeka High School where he was a standout in debate and forensics. At Brown University he earned a B.A. in Political Theory and an MFA in Poetry. He traveled on a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain in 2003 where he wrote his second book, Angle of Yaw, which was published in 2006 and was subsequently named a finalist for the National Book Award, and was selected by Brian Foley as one of the "25 important books of poetry of the 00s (2000-2009)". Lerner's third full-length poetry collection, Mean Free Path, was published in 2010.
Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was published by Coffee House Press in August 2011. It was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and New York Magazine, among other periodicals. It won the Believer Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for "first fiction" and the New York Public Library's Young Lions prize.
In 2008 Lerner began editing poetry for Critical Quarterly, a British academic publication. He has taught at California College of the Arts, the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2010 joined the faculty of the MFA program at Brooklyn College.
Lerner's mother is the well-known psychologist Harriet Lerner.
Born and raised in Topeka, which figures in each of his books of poetry, Lerner is a 1997 graduate of Topeka High School where he was a standout in debate and forensics. At Brown University he earned a B.A. in Political Theory and an MFA in Poetry. He traveled on a Fulbright Scholarship to Madrid, Spain in 2003 where he wrote his second book, Angle of Yaw, which was published in 2006 and was subsequently named a finalist for the National Book Award, and was selected by Brian Foley as one of the "25 important books of poetry of the 00s (2000-2009)". Lerner's third full-length poetry collection, Mean Free Path, was published in 2010.
Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was published by Coffee House Press in August 2011. It was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and New York Magazine, among other periodicals. It won the Believer Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for "first fiction" and the New York Public Library's Young Lions prize.
In 2008 Lerner began editing poetry for Critical Quarterly, a British academic publication. He has taught at California College of the Arts, the University of Pittsburgh, and in 2010 joined the faculty of the MFA program at Brooklyn College.
Lerner's mother is the well-known psychologist Harriet Lerner.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 60 reviews
July 30, 2014
This book of poems is divided into 4 parts: "Mean Free Path", "Doppler Elegies" and then "Mean Free Path" and "Doppler Elegies" following once more. In physics, the "mean free path" of a particle is the average distance it travels before colliding with another particle.
In some ways, I noticed the poetry in this book alludes to this measure in physics with lines like:
"At a canted angle of enabling failures
The little collisions, the path of decay"
But the thing about what Lerner does with his poetry is that he experiments with it in such a way so that you get lines of unfinished phrases grouped into stanzas. It almost appears as if Lerner wrote this work initially as a coherent piece, and then decided to be adventurous by reordering the entire thing so that it makes no sense whatsoever.
But I won't shoot it down because the lines were actually somewhat graceful and pleasant. He combines phrases that are entirely unique and unheard of with the utterly everyday and most cliche expressions. There are even places where you can combine some lines and make sense of what is said in your own way. In this way, the work is interactive. It's not one to read passively.
There are hints and glints of a suicide, a plane ride, and his beloved Ari which recur throughout the work. In a way, it's like he's trying to say something very personal, but it never really comes together because the lines are so mixed up that you can never really get at what exactly is being said.
In some ways, it's almost like when people say "There just aren't any words to express how it feels." Lerner uses language so that it never meets up in a way so that you can grasp it. It's elusive and tantalizing, like trying to take hold of reflections in water. You're just never going to be able to.
In some ways, I noticed the poetry in this book alludes to this measure in physics with lines like:
"At a canted angle of enabling failures
The little collisions, the path of decay"
But the thing about what Lerner does with his poetry is that he experiments with it in such a way so that you get lines of unfinished phrases grouped into stanzas. It almost appears as if Lerner wrote this work initially as a coherent piece, and then decided to be adventurous by reordering the entire thing so that it makes no sense whatsoever.
But I won't shoot it down because the lines were actually somewhat graceful and pleasant. He combines phrases that are entirely unique and unheard of with the utterly everyday and most cliche expressions. There are even places where you can combine some lines and make sense of what is said in your own way. In this way, the work is interactive. It's not one to read passively.
There are hints and glints of a suicide, a plane ride, and his beloved Ari which recur throughout the work. In a way, it's like he's trying to say something very personal, but it never really comes together because the lines are so mixed up that you can never really get at what exactly is being said.
In some ways, it's almost like when people say "There just aren't any words to express how it feels." Lerner uses language so that it never meets up in a way so that you can grasp it. It's elusive and tantalizing, like trying to take hold of reflections in water. You're just never going to be able to.
October 13, 2018
It's like a mashup of The Talking Heads' "Life During Wartime" and "The Wasteland".
It's 2 poems each in 2 parts: 2 titled Mean Free Path, and two titled Doppler Elegies, interspersed. Mean Free Path is in a narrative stythic verse (or close to it), and Doppler Elegies is in a free verse. Both though employ a cut up of sentences to the syntactic: prepositional phrases and verb phrases that seem lost from their immediate peers. This gives the poems an abrupt, almost meaning, almost understandable. But it left me with a dream like effect: like I'm pretty sure I know what this is about, but if asked to explain it would be like trying to interpret a Rothko painting: There's a few colors here that I totally get but then in whole? Just look at it yourself if you want to understand.
I think Lerner's The Hatred of Poetry is the essay version of these poems - and is likely "what this poem is about". No matter what the narration is describing (struggling to fall in love? coping with loneliness? stressed out life? A friend's suicide?) there's the theme of struggling to keep this a poem. Keep it from being narration, and there's a frustration that Lerner can't express what he feels or wants to say. These are the themes of his essay - finding the frustrating limits of poetry. Seeking the ideal, the devine, but knowing the form (the written language) will fall short. The 2cd Mean Free Path has this theme of the struggle with the word and the poetic form sprinkled throughout:
And more examples:
In summary here's my take on what Lerner's poems are about: A frustrating way-of-being where expressing your emotions clearly seems either embarrassing at best, or just plain unattainable at worst. And that frustration can feel like despair at times.
It's 2 poems each in 2 parts: 2 titled Mean Free Path, and two titled Doppler Elegies, interspersed. Mean Free Path is in a narrative stythic verse (or close to it), and Doppler Elegies is in a free verse. Both though employ a cut up of sentences to the syntactic: prepositional phrases and verb phrases that seem lost from their immediate peers. This gives the poems an abrupt, almost meaning, almost understandable. But it left me with a dream like effect: like I'm pretty sure I know what this is about, but if asked to explain it would be like trying to interpret a Rothko painting: There's a few colors here that I totally get but then in whole? Just look at it yourself if you want to understand.
I think Lerner's The Hatred of Poetry is the essay version of these poems - and is likely "what this poem is about". No matter what the narration is describing (struggling to fall in love? coping with loneliness? stressed out life? A friend's suicide?) there's the theme of struggling to keep this a poem. Keep it from being narration, and there's a frustration that Lerner can't express what he feels or wants to say. These are the themes of his essay - finding the frustrating limits of poetry. Seeking the ideal, the devine, but knowing the form (the written language) will fall short. The 2cd Mean Free Path has this theme of the struggle with the word and the poetic form sprinkled throughout:
There must be an easier way to do this...
I mean without writing
Put the book away, Look out the windowAnd here, as explored in The Hatred of Poetry Lerner struggles with keeping his expression a poem
Wait, I don’t want this to turn / Turn into a major novel
And more examples:
I did not walk here all the way from proseThe best section of the poems happens in the 2cd Mean Free Path where a friend's suicide (it seems) and (maybe) a breakup is cut-up with his own frustration of not being able to express what he wants to say, and with the notion of "virga" (rain that never reaches the ground) as a metaphor for poetry's frustration - it just can't reach its destination - and the hanging friend who never reaches the ground. Here's my own cut-up of quotes from part 2:
Like rain that never reaches the ground
...
Virga, or the failure of the gaze to reach
...
Before I reached the ground like virga ... To find Ari gone.
...
The pitch drops suddenly because the source
Passed away last night in Brooklyn
...
Hanged himself from the apex in the hope ... Of never reaching the ground
...
This is the lethal suspension of a friend ...
From a low beam by ligature
In summary here's my take on what Lerner's poems are about: A frustrating way-of-being where expressing your emotions clearly seems either embarrassing at best, or just plain unattainable at worst. And that frustration can feel like despair at times.
January 3, 2017
I really enjoyed Lerner's earlier works, but I don't like poems that I need guidance to read. Chopped up sentences with no clear direction as to where the different parts go, interrupted sentences... this would have been okay in one poem, to communicate a feeling, but he definitely lost me. And I'm hard to lose!
February 21, 2023
ben you're wild for this one fr
February 2, 2026
Brillant.
Read
October 21, 2020Experimental language poetry… oh boy. There are lots of little surprises if you pay close attention (be careful about getting too close… you could spend days untangling all of the references). The titular poem is essentially a bunch of word puzzles filled with repetition, abstraction, imagery, references to optics and physics, dropped predicates and “
(Frustrating open quotation marks that never get filled or closed)
With so many started thoughts and discussions without conclusion, the author is deliberately struggling to tell us something, and in fact this struggle is the subject of the poem.
Mean free path is a well-known concept in physics- how far can a particle go, on average, before interacting. Here, the title refers to the mean free path of words. Lerner is showing us the difficulties of communication with language, the misunderstandings that arise, the double entendres, etc. What is the mean free path of words? How far do they have to go, on average, before they make any sense? How much of a sentence do you need to convey a thought? Exactly how much does he have to tell you about something to not tell you anything while getting you to a point where you feel like with one more word you could surmise a meaning in this mess of words.
Maybe I just think this to feel better about not understanding what was said.
(Frustrating open quotation marks that never get filled or closed)
With so many started thoughts and discussions without conclusion, the author is deliberately struggling to tell us something, and in fact this struggle is the subject of the poem.
Mean free path is a well-known concept in physics- how far can a particle go, on average, before interacting. Here, the title refers to the mean free path of words. Lerner is showing us the difficulties of communication with language, the misunderstandings that arise, the double entendres, etc. What is the mean free path of words? How far do they have to go, on average, before they make any sense? How much of a sentence do you need to convey a thought? Exactly how much does he have to tell you about something to not tell you anything while getting you to a point where you feel like with one more word you could surmise a meaning in this mess of words.
Maybe I just think this to feel better about not understanding what was said.
Read
December 18, 2023yeah, kind of a banger, if a slightly needy one by asking for many reads. isn't this all about meeting the text tho ?
Interesting to see an almost anti-ashbery trajectory with big ben, moving towards more easily discernible themes, sentences. actually that could just be my tolerance building. anyway another formal treat, doppler-elegies which speak back to each last, echoing and ringing the previous stanza, across the page, so forth. formalist wildness. lovely
Interesting to see an almost anti-ashbery trajectory with big ben, moving towards more easily discernible themes, sentences. actually that could just be my tolerance building. anyway another formal treat, doppler-elegies which speak back to each last, echoing and ringing the previous stanza, across the page, so forth. formalist wildness. lovely
Read
January 18, 2026"movimentos subterrâneos se tornaram viáveis em todos os momentos"
comprei esse livro porque achei a capa brasileira muito bonita e a proposta da "escrita experimental" me parecer algo diviertido e fiquei impressionada como um livro escrito em 2010 se encaixa tanto com os discursos que encontramos nessa "nova era digital".
palmas a tradutora (que no posfácio apresenta uma série de nuances linguísticas que te fazem querer reler o livro para entender ele por completo)
comprei esse livro porque achei a capa brasileira muito bonita e a proposta da "escrita experimental" me parecer algo diviertido e fiquei impressionada como um livro escrito em 2010 se encaixa tanto com os discursos que encontramos nessa "nova era digital".
palmas a tradutora (que no posfácio apresenta uma série de nuances linguísticas que te fazem querer reler o livro para entender ele por completo)
August 6, 2020
why do people write like this?
December 25, 2025
The thing everyone says about Lerner is that his poems are for the head not the heart, but this means I have a soft spot for love poems which are obviously in tension with a tenancy for over-intellectualisation
February 27, 2013
Mean Free Path is quite experimental, in the way it uses language to reconstruct and destruct ideas. The recombination of text is playful and opens up the poem for reinterpretations. The fragmentation is quite jarring. Lerner invites his readers to rearrange his own poems like building blocks. His lines are out of order and can be rebuilt to whatever dimensions we want them to be. His stanzas may look tidy at first glance, but once you dig into them, they are disorderly, with no clear beginnings or ends.
The passage I chose to analyze in Mean Free Path for lines and line breaks is as follows:
The good news is light is scattered such
Toxicity means the paint must be applied
The apparent brightness of the surface
By robots one atom at a time, bad news
Is the same regardless of the angle of view
I thought I should be the one to tell you
Simultaneously, how monks sing chords
A kind of silence, what we might call
The military application of Cezanne
(Lerner, 51)
It’s easier to look at a particular passage rather than analyze the entire poem because his lines become more digestible that way. Note the way Lerner starts with “good news” as “light” and ends with bad news as the “same regardless of the angle of view.” He equates “a kind of silence” and “military application” as negative news.
Many of Lerner’s end lines serve as cliff hangers (e.g.: “The military application of Cezanne”). They leave us frustrated and wanting to know more about a briefly mentioned subject. And how do we make sense of invalid arguments like “Toxicity means the paint must be applied.” Does he want us to rearrange the text to read how we want it to: “toxicity means a kind of silence”? His poetry is filled with false starts and no clear finish (e.g. “thought I should be the one to tell you”) Tell me what?!
While reading fragmented sentences slammed together with no punctuation can be tiring and frustrating, in a way, Lerner’s poetry mimics the way we speak out loud (e.g. “Simultaneously, how monks sing chords”). We are not tidy in real speech, with proper noun-verb agreements and often end in mid-thought. Normally, we are engaged in conversation and answering someone, so our sentence replies are often fragmented when we talk. Lerner’s odd line breaks are examples of how language can break up when we become emotional and how language can also hinder communication. Lerner also writes how we dream, disjointed and incongruent.
Lerner’s poetry is unruly with its lack of punctuation (notice there are only two commas in the above passage) and violent switch in subject matter (one moment we are talking about toxic paint, and the next line moves onto robots).
Furthermore, his line endings don’t always feel meaningful (e.g.: “The good news is light is scattered such”) Why is he ending on “such” a weak word? He is breaking all the traditional rules of poetry. The line breaks are not audible. I cannot hear the music. I cannot hear the pause. I feel disengaged from the subject matter as it jumps frantically from “Toxicity” to “robots.” If line breaks “allow us to dwell in the image or idea of individual lines” as Instructor Maxwell points out, then Lerner’s does quite the opposite.
The passage I chose to analyze in Mean Free Path for lines and line breaks is as follows:
The good news is light is scattered such
Toxicity means the paint must be applied
The apparent brightness of the surface
By robots one atom at a time, bad news
Is the same regardless of the angle of view
I thought I should be the one to tell you
Simultaneously, how monks sing chords
A kind of silence, what we might call
The military application of Cezanne
(Lerner, 51)
It’s easier to look at a particular passage rather than analyze the entire poem because his lines become more digestible that way. Note the way Lerner starts with “good news” as “light” and ends with bad news as the “same regardless of the angle of view.” He equates “a kind of silence” and “military application” as negative news.
Many of Lerner’s end lines serve as cliff hangers (e.g.: “The military application of Cezanne”). They leave us frustrated and wanting to know more about a briefly mentioned subject. And how do we make sense of invalid arguments like “Toxicity means the paint must be applied.” Does he want us to rearrange the text to read how we want it to: “toxicity means a kind of silence”? His poetry is filled with false starts and no clear finish (e.g. “thought I should be the one to tell you”) Tell me what?!
While reading fragmented sentences slammed together with no punctuation can be tiring and frustrating, in a way, Lerner’s poetry mimics the way we speak out loud (e.g. “Simultaneously, how monks sing chords”). We are not tidy in real speech, with proper noun-verb agreements and often end in mid-thought. Normally, we are engaged in conversation and answering someone, so our sentence replies are often fragmented when we talk. Lerner’s odd line breaks are examples of how language can break up when we become emotional and how language can also hinder communication. Lerner also writes how we dream, disjointed and incongruent.
Lerner’s poetry is unruly with its lack of punctuation (notice there are only two commas in the above passage) and violent switch in subject matter (one moment we are talking about toxic paint, and the next line moves onto robots).
Furthermore, his line endings don’t always feel meaningful (e.g.: “The good news is light is scattered such”) Why is he ending on “such” a weak word? He is breaking all the traditional rules of poetry. The line breaks are not audible. I cannot hear the music. I cannot hear the pause. I feel disengaged from the subject matter as it jumps frantically from “Toxicity” to “robots.” If line breaks “allow us to dwell in the image or idea of individual lines” as Instructor Maxwell points out, then Lerner’s does quite the opposite.
November 29, 2016
if “mean free path” is defined as “the average distance a particle can travel before impact with another object”, the space in which a person’s thoughts can travel alone feels like the space these poems were developed in, that is in isolation. and this book was ben lerner's attempt to develop & communicate as coherent & complete an expression of love in a vacuum before impact with another object, whether internal, external or even the return of time. i think he achieved this. five stars
April 25, 2021
Lerner is a poet who likes mining science and mathematics for his conceits and he uses them to full effect. Long fugue-like poems that are both playful and serious, humorous and dire. What Lerner has a gift for is letting his analogous forms really aid the poems, and they do build more like musical movements than discrete narratives. Excellent.
October 19, 2012
Love poetry cut right of cable news boilerplate. Political, philosophical, amorous, slapstick. Formally fascinating. The poems feel scrambled in a very deliberate way, lines less out of place than belonging in several places at once, simultaneously paratactic and syntactic.
January 25, 2016
I've read this 3 or 4 times now. I feel surprised by the breadth of topics covered in such a short work. And I always feel like I learn something about the possible structure poetry and about how I, personally, parse sentences.
This is easily one of my favorite works.
This is easily one of my favorite works.
May 15, 2025
An extraordinary object. The overlapping wavefronts of the poem give the impression that it is moving towards you, that at the point of finishing reading it has moved through you, left you behind with its pieces spread out in your head. I want to read it all over again immediately.
February 20, 2010
Amazing. Beautiful. A must-read.
February 14, 2010
I reviewed it here:
http://thefanzine.com/articles/poetry...
http://thefanzine.com/articles/poetry...
May 10, 2011
Probably my least favorite of Lerner's books, but still one of 2010's strongest releases in poetry.
June 5, 2013
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. (9)
Comfortable with failure. I promise I will never
But the predicate withered. If you are
Uncomfortable seeing this as portraiture
Close your eyes. (9)
May 26, 2010
Nothing for you here but repetition
February 2, 2026
“No concept of clockwise rotation can be
Described on the surface continuously
So this might take a while. Bring a book
Have you tried breaking it into triangles
Or changing hands. No, handedness
Fascia, a tangent bundle. Can we unfold
What we can’t figure? Not without making
Cuts. Orient me, for the night is coming
Amphichiral, manifold, and looped”
Masterful, gasp-inducing work. Glittering fragments of mirrors, chemtrails crossing the sky, "bullets leav[ing] their luminous traces": everything is in motion; everything is repeated. These repetitions create palimpsests—sketched and erased words and phrases shake and alight with manifold and disparate resonances. It's cerebral, but romantic, funny, but choked with grief, unreadable, but gripping. This must be his greatest collection? It didn't cohere as much for me the first time, but this time I am obsessed and in love. Doppler Elegy is good, but the title poem is one of the greatest poems I've read from this century.
“What if I made you hear this as music
But not how you mean that.”
“Wait, I don’t want this to turn
Turn into a major novel. I want this to be
Composed entirely of edges, a little path
For Ari”
“In the hope of hearing the deflection of music
As music. There must be a way to speak
At a canted angle of enabling failures
The little collisions, the path of decay”
December 2, 2022
Was really excited by the way the physics concepts were woven into the language and form of the poems, often it felt very organic and expansive while still being sparse—but on the other hand, the main formal innovation he explores of having the lines in a given poem or stanza be out of order or rearrangeable is ultimately just frustrating most of the time.
Am also a bit frustrated by the poems being interwoven with one another as well; depending on your interpretation, there are multiple poems in the collection called "Doppler Elegies" and "Mean Free Path," or each of those poems is interrupted/intertwined with parts of the other (like a wave form, seems to be the implication).
Topics in this one (as far as I can tell) involve death of the planet, the ethics of technological warfare, mourning the death of a friend, romance and something about the nature of language... often is very hard to parse and the style rules over the substance in my opinion. Some really cool experimentation in here that will probably be used more fruitfully elsewhere or in the future is my guess. Still a very fascinating book of poems, does balance the personal and the experimental pretty well but is just a bit too frustrating for my tastes—probably a 3.5 or so for me.
Am also a bit frustrated by the poems being interwoven with one another as well; depending on your interpretation, there are multiple poems in the collection called "Doppler Elegies" and "Mean Free Path," or each of those poems is interrupted/intertwined with parts of the other (like a wave form, seems to be the implication).
Topics in this one (as far as I can tell) involve death of the planet, the ethics of technological warfare, mourning the death of a friend, romance and something about the nature of language... often is very hard to parse and the style rules over the substance in my opinion. Some really cool experimentation in here that will probably be used more fruitfully elsewhere or in the future is my guess. Still a very fascinating book of poems, does balance the personal and the experimental pretty well but is just a bit too frustrating for my tastes—probably a 3.5 or so for me.
July 16, 2025
Lerner’s Mean Free Path grapples with grief, confronting personal loss, environmental degradation, and war using experimental modes at the intersections of physics and grammar. In facing these facets of the human experience, Lerner also focuses on the gravitas of loss and how written reflection is a tool for coping. While I find the ars poetica of this piece sometimes feels heavy or obvious, Lerner’s ability employ the physic’s concept of “mean free path” (the average distance covered before a particle collides with another) in both his poetry’s content and form leaves me intrigued and moved. I keep thinking about the lines: “Except for Ari. No energy is lost if they collide / The censors inside me, and that’s love / And that’s elegy.” Something about how love and elegy exist alongside each other, and that is why grief is difficult. I also love how each line feels like a particle slammed into another, sometimes failing to connect in a very human way that mimics the process of grieving. The stanzas and poems as a whole achieve this effect as well. On the whole, Mean Free Path is a well thought out, heartfelt collection that explores how writing aids us in grieving everything from small personal losses to war and climate change.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 17, 2025
My professor was like, The problem with experimental art is that the people who make it never ask if it has succeeded. lol! Ever since reading "The Rescue" I have loved the way that Lerner writes poetry. You cannot read it expecting narrative sense. I think the way Lerner's protagonist in Leaving the Atocha Station describes John Ashbery is actually pretty accurate here too:
“It is as though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you saw only the reflection of your reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence. But it is a presence that keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror..."
Also, every time he mentions his partner Ari it makes me feel the way I did last week at an open mic night when a girl was reading and her boyfriend was smiling widely at her the entire time even though she couldn't see him, like yes love wins
“It is as though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you saw only the reflection of your reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence. But it is a presence that keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror..."
Also, every time he mentions his partner Ari it makes me feel the way I did last week at an open mic night when a girl was reading and her boyfriend was smiling widely at her the entire time even though she couldn't see him, like yes love wins
January 10, 2021
Mean Free Path is a concise yet highly dense and experimental collection of poetry, perhaps more inscrutable than the other poetry book by Lerner that I've read, the superb Angle of Yaw. Despite the complexity and discursiveness of these poems, I actually found that a rushed, almost cursory, reading approach was the most effective way for me to stitch together some semblance of topics and themes. With this method, instead of a narrow line-by-line focus, my brain was able to let the repeatedly broken thoughts and false starts from earlier in a stanza (or even much earlier in the book) fall into place with another broken thought later on. Still, this is a bit of a frustrating read in which the reader (at least this one) is left feeling like they may have missed a lot of the brilliance that Lerner offers on every page. Its briefness is a blessing, and probably one which warrants future re-readings.
. . . we prepared
brief, discontinuous remarks
designed to fall apart
When read aloud
it reminds me of that time we saw
silent films
. . . we prepared
brief, discontinuous remarks
designed to fall apart
When read aloud
it reminds me of that time we saw
silent films
June 23, 2025
How does one write about love? Lerner tries to answer this question. Language fails at some point. you could even go as far as to say all poetry is failure. What can you do when you've reached the limits of language. Lerner's solution is to try to evokes glimpses of love in his little "edges." Written in an experimental form that is hard to grasp at first. Then you read it with gusto and speed and the words and phrases begin to come together. The motifs repeat. Rain that never reaches the ground. The green of the leaves. Canada. The chopped up clauses are static; could be music. One star off because at some point I wanted the poems to end.
March 31, 2018
I much preferred the first half of this collection to the second. In the later poems, Lerner seems to have discovered a style of intercutting thoughts that really felt like a kind of deliberate formalist obscurantism, which I'm generally not a fan of. I do like his habit of blending the personal, elevated, and scientific into his poetry, though.
May 11, 2025
Fascinating conceptually, but academic by its very nature and not quite enjoyable to push through. Definitely makes sense that the main character from Leaving the Atocha Station would produce a work Mean Free Path, which is a compliment to the former novel and a bit of a slight against the latter collection. Rigorously intelligent, but with a very, very, very niche reading audience.
October 28, 2025
As the back of the book describes, these poems are "stutters, repetitions, fragmentations, recombinations." There is a flow to them, but a halting one. Sort of like a cut-and-paste job where the reader has to try and make sense of the varied combinations of lines. I understand Lerner's intent in trying to do something different, but I prefer his more "traditional" work.
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