Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon

By (author): Ray Hsu

Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon, the follow-up to Ray Hsu’s award-winning first collection, Anthropy, is the second book in a prospective trilogy that explores the “grammar of personhood.”Whereas Anthropy approached the human condition through the prism of first-, second- and third-person perspectives, Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon uses the grammatical concepts of singular and plural as grid-lines to chart contemporary life and concerns both harrowing and humane. Extending from this principal division, Hsu explores the borders between civic engagement and domesticity, dissent and accord, freedom and restriction–each of these are tested against another and framed by the tension between the collective and the individual. With Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon, Ray Hsu presents our landscape in stark light,confronting the human drama that is manifesting within our lives,and investigating how we make sense of ourselves and the world we have wrought.

AUTHOR

Ray Hsu

Ray Hsu is a poet, activist and scholar. His first book Anthropy won the 2005 League of Canadian Poets’ Gerald Lampert Award and was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. He has published over a hundred poems in more than thirty-five journals across Canada, the US and the UK, including Fence, The Fiddlehead and New American Writing. He teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia. His second collection, Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon, was published by Nightwood in 2010.

Reviews

Praise for Hsu’s previous work:

“Anthropy would be a strong collection under any circumstances; as a first book, it announces Ray Hsu as a writer whose potential is already manifest. Readers will be watching to see what he does next.”
―Douglas Barbour, Canadian Book Review
Through startling images (“Birds swing into the milk / sky like tiny rags”), Hsu investigates influences that are at once internally and culturally imposed: “Am I filling in this form / or filling it out?”…These are complex reflections on the “intricate want” of selfhood, absolutely uncaged in desire with an inquisition that is more choral than solipsistic. ―Jennifer Still, Winnipeg Free Press
The brief yet memorable poems offer glimpses into the day-to-day drama of the human condition, with particular focus on the borders that divide harmony and dissent, and the seeds of conflict that grow amid strife between individuals and society as a whole. A thoughtful and provocative compilation, that lingers in the mind and spirit long after being read.―The Midwest Book Review
Clearly, this is not … your regular poetry book but, rather, one that is intended to take you out of your complacency by challenging your expectations … Hsu brings to mind the writings of Anne Carson, as both have sought to bridge the divide between genres, both in their own way and both quite successfully.
―John Herbert Cunningham, Prairie Fire
By turns elegiac, graceful, and dramatic, Hsu’s second book is a deeply intelligent and felt contribution.
―Kit Dobson, The Goose