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

'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

''Imagine an intimate talking that takes place across an impossibly prolonged time', as Jay Gao asks us to, and you get a sense of what it's like to read this exceptionally beautiful long poem. Constructed out of gorgeous arboreal jargon and 'provisional divine chit chat', every page of this sprawling work flashes with 'lariat[s] of pinprick recognition'. It's an 'ecological tantrum', a medieval dream vision, a catalogue of many different things life contains, bound together in and by their 'otherhood'. What holds these various elements together? Or, to put the question in Gao's terms, 'What's the anti-matter'? The response this poem offers is 'Love'.'
Oli Hazzard