Imperium E-Book

Jay Gao

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Winner of A Somerset Maugham Award 2023 Winner of An Eric Gregory Award 2023 Winner of the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023 Longlisted for the Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award 2023 By reimagining episodes from Homer's Odyssey, Jay Gao's highly anticipated debut collection, Imperium, introduces an innovative talent whose work cuts across poetic traditions, traversing mythic cartographies and imperial formations. Exploring forms of absolute and intimate power, Imperium is an imaginative meditation on how the past lives on in the present by way of, and beyond, a global poetics of diaspora.

Leseprobe

Imperium

Jay Gao

CARCANET POETRY

CONTENTS

Title PageEpigraph Hero WorshipImperium AbecedarianPersons Not WelcomeHostisThe FigNot Unequal to ManyStorm SpellBeeswaxSeeing Man (I)Eulogy for ElpenorNostalgiaBody SonnetNobodyBody SonnetSeeing Man (II)Agent OrangeHostelThe Sanctuary Shall Offer SafetyHostileWhere There is Bread There Is My CountryImperiumRest and Recuperation AcknowledgementsAbout the AuthorCopyright

I am suspicious of heroes. How do they survive?

— Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo

The shipwrecked, tremulous navigator anticipates the work of the compass.

— Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno

I am not nostalgic. Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined the underpinnings. One is misled when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo.

— Dionne Brand

HERO WORSHIP

I wake to stay in bed again, decide

every minor error of mine will remain broken in its wildness.

Nights of loss now end peacefully and rarely with restless

sediment. Beyond doubt, I no longer feel alone.

Update on security incident is the subject of these siren emails;

so it seems ghosts keep trying to hack the university’s global

trade routes. I dream about our sacred technicians haunting around

the anxious clock. Deep breathing. Remain

vigilant. I remind myself I am the translation machine. Excavated,

I am multiplying. In the morning, it must have snowed

even if I did not witness it.

This inert world seemed so buried with an off-white energy

yet to be exploited, and I made a gambit to get my body out of there,

a homecoming in disguise, my old return. Jupiter, Saturn,

Mercury aligned a few weeks ago without me even knowing.

Yet I could still perceive it. I think I slept right through it,

like a dress rehearsal before death.

No matter how many rooms

I gift my heroic molecules, they refuse to fall in line,

to deterritorialise. To be honest, I am excited to know what aporias

you will be planning soon, I praise our tenantless sun.

This year, I resolve to be both at home and not,

wet with words, my fingers within language

then doing without.

One childhood ambition was to project myself way into the past

like a statue.

I wanted to end by walking backwards, trace

slower circles in my back garden; in the distance,

beyond the steel mountains, I hear a train slip back into

the platform of its avant-garde station with a click, that snap of setting

a pen’s cap back on. The hands of the train are lifted

straight up as if to say: Okay.

You got me. I admit it,

I yield my tempo.

Just let me surrender over

all my worlded goods to you.

IMPERIUM ABECEDARIAN

Oh! Adventurer

Oh! Boss

Oh! Coloniser

Oh! Despot

Oh! Emperor

Oh! Fascist

Oh! God

Oh! Hero

Oh! Imperator

Oh! Jailer

Oh! King

Oh! Leader

Oh! Monarch

Oh! Nazi

Oh! Overlord

Oh! Pioneer

Oh! Queen

Oh! Ruler

Oh! Sovereign

Oh! Translator

Oh! Usurper

Oh! Voyeur

Oh! Wanderer

Oh! Xénos

Oh! You

Oh! Zealot

let us start the clock

PERSONS NOT WELCOME

I left all my slippery toy soldiers on the washing machine lid

those wet miniatures

travel sized men I will have to scoop up in the morning

I clutched my dirty clothes to my chest like a bouquet of limbs

in last night’s omen

I was a child                      lost in that hallway again

I was a newly sewn doll longing to be filled up with sand

on a branch I saw three apples                     made of metal

waiting to mutate

A bruise the size of an eye leading to

rust the size of my nation

HOSTIS

take care, do not know me,

deny me, do not recognise me,

shun me; for this reality

is infectious

— H.D.

Flying home, west, I hitch my pity

onto the mosquito trapped under the cling film

of this exotic dragon fruit salad. On its last long leg we shared

one vessel. Its authority to inflict human suffering unsettled me,

as I carefully ate around the heritages housing its stuck body.

I had read an article that said our kinship with them

can be most compellingly imagined through the metaphor of war.

You have killed nearly half of all the humans

who have ever lived; there is little of history left over you have not

yet touched. And so, the article explained, even expat mosquitoes

will, one day, clandestinely evolve some resistance to their poison,

artemisinin, with each new generation. Unless we modify

the fertility genes in the females; eradicate, in an entire genus,

the vector for disease. Genius