A review by torchlab
The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner

4.0

A quick, interesting read. I am not a huge poetry reader so I picked this book up in part to understand why I'm turned off by poetry. Its central argument—that all poems are an attempt to imagine a perfect ideal form of Poetry and thus all poems necessarily fail to fulfill this ideal—is one of those great counterintuitive literary criticism theses that just animates a whole text.