Poetry Collection
Carcanet, August 2022
Paperback, 92 pages
ISBN: 9781800172470
**Winner of the 2023 Michael Murphy Memorial Prize**
**Winner of a 2023 Eric Gregory Award**
**Winner of a 2023 Somerset Maugham Award**
**Shortlisted for the 2022 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award**
**Longlisted for the 2023 Anglo-Hellenic League Runciman Award**
By reimagining episodes from Homer's Odyssey, Jay Gao's highly anticipated debut collection, Imperium, introduces an innovative talent whose work cuts across poetic traditions, traversing mythic cartographies and imperial formations. Exploring forms of absolute and intimate power, Imperium is an imaginative meditation on how the past lives on in the present by way of, and beyond, a global poetics of diaspora.
REVIEWS
'These poems reject the heroism of the legible "I". If a central figure emerges it might be that of the Anti-Translator, not there to disclose personal information but to reveal the bareness of our "corpse-lives". Jay Gao's Imperium marks a new chapter in British poetry, bringing to bear a new complexity, richness of thought and influence.'
Will Harris, author of RENDANG
'Nuanced, challenging, sometimes hilarious, often anguished, this impressive reimagining of The Odyssey makes for an unforgettable road trip; Gao’s Odysseus is a nervy and compelling traveller, a sort of non-hero, itinerant and always somewhat lost. The translator has always slipped off; we are never in possession of the shibboleth that would admit us home. Waylaid with Gao in hotel bars and tour buses, we are estranged, sensitized as we go to the dislocations and non-belonging of children of the world’s diasporas, and also to the structures of appropriation and exploitation embedded in travel. We are all conditioned and implicated; but perhaps this acute and attentive Odysseus is exactly who we need to help us listen to the buried histories of Imperialism, to “wait a little differently, mourn a / little more”.'
Fiona Benson, author of Vertigo & Ghost
'Jay Gao reminds us in this stunning debut poetry collection, Imperium, that difficulty trades in the spiritual and material. His loosely-based Odyssey showcases a contemporary journey across libraries, book-making, conceptual poetry, sexuality and internationalism, whilst still championing Scotland, his Chinese heritage and sense of continual dislocation as echolocations, as ways of finding out about our plural selves and shifting shapes of the places where we belong, albeit temporarily, nominally, though no less meaningfully.'
Fred D'Aguiar, judge for the 2023 Somerset Maugham Award
'Imperium struck me immediately as the work of a poet mind shot through with intellect and cultural capital. Its strength, for me, is found not only in the fashion it reimagines the mythic, but the manner in which it leans away from this aspect and towards a localised, sensitive and emotive personal register.'
Wayne Holloway-Smith, judge for the 2023 Eric Gregory Award
'With astonishing virtuosity, Imperium unpicks the very notion of virtuosity, and excellence, the inheritances of empire that dominate any idea of what poetry might be or aspire to. Gao’s talent sings and singes so heroically and deliciously across this mournful, provocative, desirous and subversive book. It’s ‘Abecedarian work’ of a sort, lying back and thinking ‘of antiquity’, the better to imagine its ramifications in the present as they come crashing down.'
Colin Herd in Gutter
'Bold and ambitious, Jay Gao’s Imperium demonstrates the eruption of a singular voice and wit [...] Imperium’s linguistic acrobatics similarly draw strength from the range, risk and innovation of the poet’s work. The project is borne aloft by Gao’s capacious imagination and his lyrical as well as formal diligence [...] Gao’s debut emerges as an unforgettable read in these changing and pluralistic times.'
Shalini Sengupta in Poetry School
'The first full collection by the young Chinese-Scottish poet introduces a prodigiously assured and gifted new voice. Gao is searchingly intelligent across an exceptionally wide range of material. This includes bereavement, the natural world, classical myth, US veteran’s trauma and living a hyphenated identity in a post-colonial world – examined, in the poem Hostis, through the image of a mosquito trapped in cling film in an inflight meal. Imperium doesn’t simply namecheck ideas and experiences, but explores them, with vital and disconcerting results. Not Unequal to Many moves with rapid grace from observation of nature to an evocation of classical Greek priests scrying entrails: “those suited egrets waited by the stream for their / sweetbreads / like a map each new world opens with a knife to the body”. This rich hinterland of knowledge is never fusty, always alive, even in the beautiful Body Sonnet, fractured by grief and haunted by “the breath of those / inert evenings … / hospital windows from the last night ever”.'
Fiona Sampson in The Guardian
'Jay Gao begins his debut collection, Imperium, by surrendering at once. Focusing on the Odyssey, Gao approaches mythology with playfulness and humour. His refusal to treat the material with outsized gravity lends the book a seductive impishness, each poem functioning as a different kind of flirtation. Imperium's poems don't seek combat, just a little attention, its speakers mythic pick-mes, helpless in their swoon. Rather than gods and legends, we are all 'like understudies vying / for history's shade'.'
James Butler-Gruett in Poetry London
'Jay Gao re-works The Odyssey into his own footnote with clarity and finesse. The conditions of being scattered to the winds is second nature to these poems, which are rightfully wary of resting on structures of home, history, desire in line with imperialist myths that should not be trusted. Beautiful and brimming, Gao pushes at forms, world-builds atop nationalistic realities, mutably changes state, and, even when still, remains in constant, ticking motion.'
Leah Jun Oh in Poetry Book Society Autumn Bulletin
'Imperium is an askance and enthralling book. It takes patience, but the work is rewarded [...] The reader may wish to skip to the middle of the book, and an astonishing prose-poem called “Nobody” which most clearly riffs on “The Odyssey”; but translated into a world of humid hotel rooms, anonymous bars, colonial exploitation, where “light jazz stumbles in from the reception like released, newly-anaesthetised, hostages”.'
Stuart Kelly in The Scotsman
'The poems in Imperium invite the reader to travel through them in various ways [...] Gao's deep understanding of and curiosity towards language translates into experimental forms that are fresh, fascinating, and a profoundly intentional, balancing of sentient and mechanical. '
Thembe Mvula in Magma Poetry
'Jay Gao's Imperium takes us on a tourist tour of the world to explore the temptations that beset the lyrical imagination on holiday in the imperial zones of globalization [...] This is an elaborately resourceful book, driven by a wittily self-conscious and politically savvy comic brio, satirical about its staging of its very counter-imperial animus, a powerful and febrile text.'
Adam Piette in Blackbox Manifold
'Jay Gao’s debut, so-named, promises poetry that disturbs singular ways of looking at or dealing with power. Imperium’s references and touchstones range across time and space (from Angkor Wat to Odysseus to the Vietnam war), admirably managing to reckon with such an epic sweep of ideas through the lens of the lyric “I” (disguised, sometimes, as the lyric “you”), in a relatively slim volume of poems.'
Tse Hao Guang in Asian Books Blog
'Imperium is about power in many senses. It brings in alienation and diaspora, cultural influence and enchantment, language and tradition, entanglement and loss. And language, always language. It’s about the world en route to uncertainty, no idea where home (if it even exists) might be or what it might be called [...] And so he brings lived experience to bear, pulling in new references as he goes, an unrooted traveller on a complex, demanding, challenging journey. I was privileged to travel with him for a while, and I have come back changed. When I arrived at the end of Imperium for the third time, two things were true. I was buzzing with ideas and questions, and I was curiously moved. Which is what I had been looking for all along.'
Helena Nelson in This Friday Poem
'[Imperium] is an intelligent and bold piece of work that delves into the complex layers of self and the interception between imagination and reality, as one travels across borders, histories, and traditions.'
Jennifer Wong in Wasafiri