Jay Gao and friends celebrate the publication of The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber (Nightboat)
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 Adelphi University and on the teaching faculty of Adelphi's low-residency MFA.
Tessa Bolsover
Tessa Bolsover is a poet based in Brooklyn, NY. Her first book, Crane, was published by Black Ocean in 2025. Her work has appeared in Peripheries, Annulet, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Brooklyn Rail, diSONARE, The Slow Poetry in America Newsletter, The Swan, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Brown University and is currently pursuing a PhD at Duke. She is also a founding editor of auric press.
Emily Skillings
Emily Skillings is the author of the poetry collections Fort Not (2017) and Tantrums in Air (2025), both published by The Song Cave. Tantrums in Air was named one of the best poetry books of 2025 by The New York Times. Skillings’ recent poems can be found in Poetry, Harper’s, Granta, The Yale Review, and the New York Review of Books. Skillings is an Assistant Professor of English at Villanova University.
Erica Hunt
Erica Hunt is a poet and essayist. Her books include Local History, Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Flies Right Before the Eyes, and VERONICA: A Suite in X Parts. Jump the Clock, a new and selected collection of Hunt's poems, was published by Nightboat Books. Hunt's poems and non-fiction have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, FENCE, and Hambone, among other publications. Her essays on poetics, feminism, and politics have been collected in Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, A-LINE, and The Politics of Poetic Form. With poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt co-edited the anthology Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing (2018).
Andrew Wells
Andrew Wells is a poet, editor, and teacher. His work has appeared in The London Magazine, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, berlin lit, SAND Journal, and others. He is the author of two chapbooks, Sealed (Hesterglock 2020) and Menacing Sense (Osmanthus 2021), and the editor of HVTN Press. He tutors for the Poetry School and works as a high school English teacher in Brooklyn.