Sleepers Awake

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.”