Jay Gao's debut collection Imperium introduces a compelling innovative talent. These poems layer together formal experiments, lyric intensity and occasionally sardonic perspectives on the contemporary. His perspective is refreshingly original: he writes as a Chinese-Scottish poet, critic and editor. He has published three pamphlets and is a contributing editor to The White Review. He divides his life between Edinburgh and Providence, Rhode Island. What emerges in Imperium, in the uses and revisions of classical antecedents (Homer, Ovid, Sappho), is a sense of how to live in moments which are visited by, and never free of, the memory of trauma. Will Harris writes of Gao's style: 'At once spectral and vivid, timeless and current, these broken rhythms and stalled narratives attempt to sift through the wreckage of War, and to argue back to it.'
