<DIV><p><i>The Lichtenberg Figures</i>, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, is an unconventional sonnet sequence that interrogates the relationship between language and memory, violence and form. &ldquo;Lichtenberg figures&rdquo; are fern-like electrical patterns that can appear on (and quickly fade from) the bodies of people struck by lightning.</p><p>Throughout this playful and elegiac debut&mdash;with its flashes of autobiography, intellection, comedy, and critique&mdash;the vocabulary of academic theory collides with American slang and the idiom of the Old Testament meets the jargon of the Internet to display an eclectic sensibility.</p><p><b>Ben Lerner</b>, the youngest poet ever published by Copper Canyon Press, is co-founder of <i>No: a journal of the arts</i>. He earned an MFA from Brown University and is currently a Fulbright scholar in Spain.</p></DIV>