This book has stayed with me since I read it. Ben Lerner’s extended prose and verse sequences are strange, interesting. They dazzle with wit and then clobber with heavy truth.

Some of the prose pieces are smart microessays on culture, and the book as a whole takes a critical stance to our post 9/11 American practice. It moves from the realm of near-Dada to near-propaganda and back again, demonstrating how similar the two impulses really are.