[10/20/26] Gao, Jay: The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber

Nightboat Books, paperback

Publication Date: October 20, 2026

Publisher Marketing:

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.