Join us at EBB for a double poetry launch, presenting Jay Gao's * The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber* (Carcanet Press) and Imogen Cassels' *Hares On The Mountain* (Tenement Press). With support from local poets Tom Nutting and Caleb Parkin.

Part ecopoetic inventory, part dream vision, Jay Gao’s *The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber* is an experimental book-length serial poem on the arboreal. Rewiring nature and language, this collection is an inventory for dreaming treely, dispersed across a commons-place of grafting and cruising, racial and queer desires, diasporic entanglements and renewal. These serial poems arrive at the hewn nation of the unthought like an invasive species addled by contemporary contaminants. Alternating between leafy lexical snippets and branching hypermetrical lines, the book turns sylvestral form and grammar over towards a visionary ecopoetics.

Cassels’ *Hares on the mountain* engages with the folk ballad of the same name, to offer an observational suite of airs obsessed with the act of looking and watching as a transformative play, examines the dealer’s hand to portray the habitually wounded. These poems are an active ‘watching’ of the wounded as she goes out and sets her stall for wounding in kind; and an effort to convey what she finds—or subsequently forges—in her finding. In a merger of tenses—of foresight, hindsight, and presentism— *Hares on the mountain* mimics the want and will of a song to walk, stroll, and wander—to drift in a leisurely and aimless way between contexts, whilst remembering and/or misremembering something of its true self as it travels—to observe the tidal drift of change engendered by climates and elements and objects in a landscape of good / bad emotions until the season is over, and the subject repairs itself to a new winter. 

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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* is forthcoming from Nightboat Books and Carcanet Press. His debut collection *Imperium* (2022) was a winner of the 2023 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize, an Eric Gregory Award, and a Somerset Maugham Award.

Imogen Cassels is the author of *Hares on the mountain* (2026) and *Silk Work* (2025), as well as the pamphlet, *Peach machine* (2025). Her essays and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in the TLS, Poetry Review, Little Mirror, Oxford Poetry, and The Literary Review. She lives in London. 

Tom Nutting is a writer and psychiatrist in Bristol, UK. He writes on queer ecologies, activism and mental illness. He won a 2026 Rialto Nature and Place poetry prize, and has been shortlisted for the Starkie, MĀNOA and Aurora poetry prizes. His writing has appeared in The London Magazine, Magma, The Stinging Fly, fourteen poems, and elsewhere. He’s a contributing editor at Anteroom. 

Caleb Parkin is a poet, performer, facilitator, educator and filmmaker, based in Bristol. His poems have featured in The Guardian and the Poetry Review,** among other journals. He has published the poetry collections *Mingle* (Nine Arches Press, 2024), *The Coin* (Broken Sleep, 2022) and *This Fruiting Body* (Nine arches Press, 2021). From 2020 - 2022, he was the third Bristol City Poet.

Entry requirements: no age restrictions (under 18s to be accompanied by an adult over 21yrs, 1:1 ratio) — Read more — Read less