Jay Gao Poetry Launch Extravaganza

Jay Gao and friends celebrate the publication of The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber (Nightboat) with Jimin Seo, Chris Campanioni, Emily Lee Luan, Tessa Bolsover, Emily Skillings, Erica Hunt, and Andrew Wells Part ecopoetic inventory, part dream vision, The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber is an experimental book-length poem on the arboreal. Rewiring nature and language, Jay Gao’s second collection is an inventory for dreaming treely, dispersed across a common(s)place of grafting and cruising, racial and queer desires, diasporic entanglements and renewal. This serial poem arrives at the hewn nation of the unthought like an invasive species addled by contemporary contaminants. Alternating between leafy lexical snippets and long branching lines, The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber turns sylvestral form and grammar over towards a visionary ecopoetics. Jay Gao Jay Gao is a poet and writer from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His second poetry collection The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber (2026) is published with Nightboat Books and Carcanet Press. Currently, he is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Jimin Seo Jimin Seo is the author of OSSIA and A-1982. His recent projects include Poems of Consumption with H Sinno at the Barbican Centre in London and a site activation for salazar|sequero|medina’s Open Pavilion at the 4th Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. He is visiting professor of English at William & Mary. Emily Lee Luan Emily Lee Luan is the author of 回 / Return (April 2023), a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and I Watch the Boughs, selected by Gabrielle Calvocoressi for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. A 2025 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, she is an Assistant Professor of English at…