My Life as a Time Traveller
a Memoir in 18 Discrete Fragments
Published on 5. November 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
26 pages
978-1-916830-04-2 (ISBN)
Description
In My Life as a Time Traveller, Oz Hardwick pushes the idea of memoir into dazzlingly unexpected territories, foregrounding pattern and imaginative perception over anecdote.Oz is known for prose poems that are "relentlessly thoughtful about the nature of time," and which "play with time ... with highly compelling, disconcerting results," and has recently been described as "an Einstein of prose poetry, reconfiguring our understanding of time and space". The 18 Discrete Fragments in this poetry sequence mix past, present, and future into a heady alchemical compound that distils each moment into the gold of sand, egg yolk, or a falling autumn leaf.
The Surrealist dream logic of the poems here is born from reflection on the nature of the self within the world when one is revealed to be one's own most unreliable narrator. In a rare instance of explanation, Oz reveals that "one of the more interesting/infuriating ways in which my brain works is that I don't have a neurotypical perception of linear time: it is, as the film says, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and these poems offer vignettes of that experience."
Precisely focused, and shaped with Oz's customary mastery of craft, these poems are personal on the molecular level at which, paradoxically, individuality becomes universal. Together, they amount to a memoir of now, in which "now" is the fourteenth century, where a dodo that grew from a seed, grown weary of browsing art galleries, slips his half-forgotten children from the freezer, and contemplates retirement. We've all been there, and in this wildly implausible collection, Oz presents an irrefutable case which suggests that we're all there now.
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 210 mm
Width: 148 mm
Thickness: 2 mm
Weight
49 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-916830-04-2 (9781916830042)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Oz Hardwick is a European poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies, and who has been described as a "major proponent of the neo-surreal prose poem in Britain."He has published "about a dozen" full collections and chapbooks, including Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) which won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry, and most recently A Census of Preconceptions (Dublin: SurVision Books, 2022). A keen collaborator, Oz is always working with artists in diverse media, including musicians, painters, photographers, and other writers. This has resulted in exhibitions, mixed-media performances, recordings, and publications. The latter include the 2021 Hedgehog chapbook The Still and Fleeting Fire with Amina Alyal.Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University, and has published extensively on Creative Writing. He has also edited or co-edited several anthologies, including The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) with Anne Caldwell, with whom he also co-edited Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022). The anthology Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Manoeuvres, co-edited with Cassandra Atherton, will be published by MadHat Press (Cheshire, MA) in 2024.Described as "exhaustingly prolific", as a photographer, Oz has had work on many rock album covers; as a musician, he has played at the Glastonbury Festival as the Summer Solstice sun rose; and as an academic he has published extensively on medieval art and literature, and on Creative Writing: however, he wishes it to be known that not one item on this list is as impressive as it sounds. In 2022, he was awarded the ARC Poetry Prize for "a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry" but, at time of writing, is not dead yet.