We are delighted to welcome Jay Gao and Padraig Regan to Blackwell’s to celebrate publication of their poetry collections.

The Dead One, the Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber and The Matter, both published by Carcanet Press. Jay and Padraig will be in conversation with Andrew McMillan.

Doors: 6.30pm, Starts: 6.45pm

Tickets are £5 or admission is included when purchasing a Book & Ticket option.

About the Books:

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.

The Matter follows on from Padraig Regan’s decorated debut, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2022 and won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry 2023., The Matter deepens the ekphrastic concerns of their previous work, directing their gaze towards naturally occurring objects. Divided into three parts of lyrical abundance – Animal, Mineral and Vegetable – the parts are linked by their attempts to imaginatively encounter the non-human (and at times, the inorganic) in ways that pay attention to the different formal or material possibilities of embodiment, and offer new foils for this remarkable poet’s intense reflections on mortality and desire.

About the Authors:

Jay Gao is a poet from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in New York City. His debut poetry collection Imperium (Carcanet, 2022) was a winner of the 2023 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. He is also the author of five poetry chapbooks and pamphlets. Currently, he reads for Poetry magazine and is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Padraig Regan‘s debut collection Some Integrity was published by Carcanet in 2022 and received the Clarissa Luard Award and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. They are the author of two poetry pamphlets: Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017). In 2015, they were a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and in 2020 they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Prize. They hold a PhD on creative-critical and hybridised writing practices in medieval texts and the work of Anne Carson from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, where they were a Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow in 2021. They were a Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge from 2022 to 2024.