SLEEPERS AWAKE: Oli Hazzard & Emily Skillings

Hazzard’s avant-garde confessional invites readers into an impressive, kinetic cinema of organized chaos.Publishers Weekly

 

On the occasion of the publication of Sleepers Wake (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2025), the new poetry collection from Oli Hazzard, The Flow Chart Foundation presents a reading & discussion with Oli Hazzard—to us in Hudson, NY from Scotland—together with poet Emily Skillings. The two will also join in a conversation about their work.

 

NOTE: Please secure tickets in advance. All tickets at the door will be $12.

About 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.”

Oli Hazzard is the author of three books of poems, including Sleepers Awake (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), and a novel, Lorem Ipsum (Prototype, 2021). He lives in Glasgow and teaches at the University of St Andrews.

Emily Skillings is the editor of Parallel Movement of the Hands: Five Unfinished Longer Works by John Ashbery. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches creative writing at Yale, NYU, and Columbia.

Date

Feb 08 2025
Expired!

Time

5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
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