The Clichés / Ben Lerner & R.H. Quaytman

Printed in an edition of 300 perfect-bound books.

54 pages

(domestic shipping only)

Ben Lerner's The Clichés is an experiment in poetic dialogue, presenting the intimate, funny, often profound conversation of two people in bed. Two people—but their braided conversation forms a third thing: the poem that emerges from the enjambments and real-time crossings of their speech.  

 R.H. Quaytman—through brilliant design and images—has created a second order dialogue: between text and image, concretion and abstraction, creating an energetic visual rhythm that complements and complicates the writing.

Ben Lerner is the author of seven books of poetry and prose, as well as several collaborations with visual artists. He has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, among other honors. His new book of poems, The Lights, will appear in 2023.

R. H. Quaytman is an American/Irish artist known for a painting practice organized into chapters dating back to 2001. R. H. Quaytman, opened fall 2022 at the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland. Modern Subjects, Chapter Zero, opened in 2021 at the WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art in Brussels. The Sun Does Not Move, Chapter 35, opened in 2019 at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Poland, and traveled to the Serralves Museum in Porto, Portugal, in 2020. Quaytman's work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.