Mean Free Path

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. Youcalled 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, youstartled

Ben Lerneris 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.