Over the past six months, my favorite new poet has been Ben Lerner. This is why:

“A large group of picnicking children is struck by lightning. Four girls and four dogs are killed. Twenty-three children suffer burns, cataracts, macular holes, tympanic membrane rupture, and skull fracture. At the church service, the pasor organizes his eulogy around the trope of being called. God reached down with a finger of light, ect. But the positive charge originated in the ground and climbed an invisible ladder of electrons skyward.”

“Talk me down, man, talk me down. Obsessive repetition of maningless gestures. A dangerous level of light in the blood. The caller claims to have discovered teh imprint of a trilobite embedded in the sky. It’s the kind of thing, he says, that makes you pray to God. That you might live forever. In these several states of shock. At what point in the coversation did you realize her breathing had stopped? When I kissed her. But there’ sno time for this. the black helicopters are upon us, our daughters flee from the house, weeping, crazy with joy.”

From his most recent book Angle Of Yaw.