Sleepers Awake
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A brilliantly inventive book of poems from a fierce poetic voice, whose work John Ashbery called “exciting, necessary, and new.”
Sleepers Awake, Oli Hazzard’s third collection, emerges from the daily disarray of care and work, nature and technology. Its ambitious, formally various poems extract “the ore / from boredom,” as memory —personal, familial, social, historical—and the collective memory of poetry itself are wrenched out of shape by dramatic disruptions in rhythm, space, and scale. The sadness and pain of forgetting is here too, alongside its unexpected forms of potential.
The title, borrowed from the Lutheran hymn that inspired a Bach cantata, catches the book’s dreamy, kaleidoscopic, cross-temporal dialogues. By way of satirical, allusive, tender, hopeful poems, Sleepers Awake makes spaces for intimacy with the reader, arguing “through an off-key melody / for the jovial texture of batshit relations, for the pleasure of live-drawing in skeptical company.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hazzard (Progress: Real and Imagined) explores modern mayhem through winding poems full of pithy wordplay in his energetic third collection. Woven throughout are lyrical vignettes that appreciate life's quiet moments. With wry gusto, he alludes to the distracted, divided self: "Knowing you're being duped// Kind of enjoying it// Watching the image of the plane you're on// Humming during sex// Shaving while eating// Writing while hovering." Throughout, Hazzard captures exercises in futility ("Cooling hot milk/ in an ice bath/ today's screaming./ Roaming the ratios/ like a diorama/ rubbernecking vernacular") and presents the lure of the technological future as a psychological crutch: "A sweet retreat from the responsibility/ Of being a person, separate/ From sensation's confetti, life/ Fluttering on the screengrab surface?" He also explores what deconstruction yields: "Gold is formed during the death of a star.// There you are.// One poem, but inside it/ hundreds of smaller poems// each with an agenda of its own// pupae in the rotten bark." In another reflection on the poetic medium, he playfully takes aim at literary pretension: "White glove// flouting the form// twatting a thrush/ straight out the sky." Though at times enigmatic, Hazzard's avant-garde confessional invites readers into an impressive, kinetic cinema of organized chaos.
