The Dead One, the Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber - by Jay Gao (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Part ecopoetic inventory, part dream vision, The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in the Ear, Thriving Slumber is an experimental book-length serial poem on the arboreal.

Rewiring nature and language, Jay Gao's second collection is an inventory for dreaming treely, dispersed across a commons-place of grafting and cruising, racial and queer desires, diasporic entanglements and renewal. These serial poems arrive at the hewn nation of the unthought like an invasive species addled by contemporary contaminants. Alternating between leafy lexical snippets and branching hypermetrical lines, The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in the Ear, Thriving Slumber turns sylvestral form and grammar over towards a visionary ecopoetics.

Review Quotes

"This pamphlet is a risk-taking and worthwhile forest of poetic deliberation and craft."

--Oluwaseun Olayiwola, The Guardian, in praise of Bark, Archive, Splinter

"A prodigiously assured new voice . . . This rich hinterland of knowledge is never fusty, always alive."

--Fiona Sampson, The Guardian, in praise of Imperium

"Jay Gao's Imperium marks a new chapter in British poetry, bringing to bear a new complexity, richness of thought and influence."

--Will Harris, in praise of Imperium

About the Author

Jay Gao is a poet from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His debut collection Imperium (2022) was a winner of the 2023 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, an Eric Gregory Award, and a Somerset Maugham Award. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.