Angle of Yaw.(Brief article)(Book review)

Angle of Yaw BEN LERNER. Copper Canyon, $15 paper (140p) ISBN 1-55659-246-9

Employing the language of aphorism, advertising, parable, personal essay, political tirade, journalism and journal, the collage-like poems of Lerner's second collection express the ennui of American life in an era when even war feels like a television event. Two sequences of untitled prose poems weave public and private discourse, yielding often absurd yet frighteningly accurate observations: "We have willingly suspended our disbelief on strings in order to manipulate it from above"; "Some child actors have never been off camera"; "The right to have it both ways is inalienable or it isn't." …