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But as several reviewers have already noted, no one but Lerner seems to observe such a hatred.

It would certainly go a ways toward explaining the bitter, widespread hatred of poetry one observes in the world today. The argument of the book goes roughly as follows: (1.) True Poetry is a spotless abstraction of which every real poem is a contemptible travesty, (2.) meanwhile, all of us share, as an innate condition of our humanity, a subconscious love for True Poetry, a love that (3.) gives rise to a bitter widespread hatred of all the real poems that roam the earth cheapening True Poetry’s good name. The Hatred of Poetry, which helpfully includes marginal glosses on nearly all of its 83 pages of text, reads like a virtuosic barstool rant by a precocious freshman whose only failing is never having seen the inside of a room he wasn’t the smartest person in. Ben Lerner’s The Hatred of Poetry is a slim book with a husky premise: “The fatal problem with poetry: poems.” This is Lerner’s first book since winning a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2015 for his two widely celebrated novels.