Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber

Jay Gao is a poet from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His debut poetry collection Imperium (Carcanet, 2022) was a winner of the 2023 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. He is also the author of five poetry chapbooks and pamphlets. Currently, he reads for Poetry magazine and is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

'How do you read a book that is falling apart in your hands? Jay Gao proposes the sentence as something rotting and churning: a "fungal shimmer." In The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber, mud and flesh are evoked in configurations that illuminate the moment when "earth gives way." Fieldwork, in Gao's second collection, is a mode of dissolution that collapses and distends the boundary between skin and splinter, bark and archive. As Gao writes: "...have you seen enough." There's no question mark. How do you write a book that breaks off, that stops being written, in the middle of a sentence that is also a line?'Bhanu Kapil