Ben Lerner, Personal Poet

Who is Ben Lerner? Readers of his fiction will be able to supply some answers: an intellectual and a museumgoer, a Midwesterner turned Brooklyn-dwelling dad, someone deeply interested in the world around him but ambivalent about his commitments toward it. While not exhaustive, his trio of autofictional novels—Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04, and The Topeka School—serves as a record of his life and development: We see him move (sometimes through his fictional alter ego, Adam Gordon) from his debate-team high school years and post-collegiate languors into maturity and middle age in the Trump era. All the while, Lerner has written poems, the form he started with before his success as a novelist. And while the protagonists of his novels have always identified themselves as poets, a much wider readership has come to know Lerner through his prose.