Chaos Theories

By Elizabeth Hazen

The poems in Elizabeth Hazen's debut collection, Chaos Theories, spring from a unique collusion of science and art in one poet's heart and mind. In these often elegiac poems, Hazen explores many forms of love — between children, parents, siblings, friends, and lovers. In powerful poetic language and structure, loss is explored, and survival becomes another form of understanding, a way of seeing ourselves and others not as guilty or innocent, good or bad, but as complex, sometimes thwarted beings who are always striving for more wisdom, more empathy, more light. Hazen's language is elegant, her point of view unflinching, her voice mature and warm. Science in these poems is both information and consolation, a way of untangling chaos, of seeing more clearly and cleanly. Hazen is a poet who understands that we are all searching in various ways to make order of our lives and loves, and who crafts poems that can aid us in that search.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Santa Fe Writer's Project
• Release date: Apr 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781942892045

Book preview

Ocean

Acknowledgments

To the editors at Alan Squire Publishing, Rose Solari and James Patterson, I owe my deepest gratitude. Thank you for believing in my writing and for working so hard to make this book happen. Thanks also to Andrew Gifford and the team at Santa Fe Writers Project for your guidance and support, and to Nita Congress and Randy Stanard for your help with the book’s design.

Jessica Blau, Betsy Boyd, Elisabeth Dahl, Jane Delury, Carl Ehrhardt, Kathy Flann, Martin Galvin, Paris Goudas, Rosie Goudas, Christine Grillo, James Magruder, Chrissi Moore, Marion Winik, and Sarah Woodruff — without your feedback, your encouragement, and your friendship, this book would not exist. Thank you.

Robert, Margaret, and Benjamin Hazen — thank you for the opportunities, inspiration, solace, and love you have always provided.

And Patrick Flynn Eckenrode — so many of these poems are for you. I wish you were here to read them.

I would like to acknowledge the following publications in which these poems first appeared:

Arch: Summer 1985

Bellevue Literary Review: After Electro-Convulsive Therapy

Best American Poetry 2013, Southwest Review: Thanatosis

Bluestem: Remains

Booth: Maxwell’s Demon

The Common: Burial at Shanidar, While our father was hunting rocks

The Common Online: Erosion, Meditation on Divorce During Summer Storm, Spring Planting

The Comstock Review: Bed Rest

Crab Orchard Review: Burning Trash

Fourteen Hills: Underwear Girl

Free State Review: Snapshots

Gargoyle: Coastal, Ghost Story

Memoir Journal: Road Trip, Winter Funeral

The Normal School: Chaos Theory, Separation

The Nervous Breakdown: Closet

PANK: Bottom Dwellers, Chaos Theory, Physics Lesson, Separation

Salamander: Bottom Dwellers, Physics Lesson

Signature Journal: Shark Teeth

The Threepenny Review: Trilobites

Three Quarter Review: First Word in a Time of Mourning

The Toronto Quarterly: Extraction, Meditation on Entropy

Unsplendid: Last Anniversary, The Spectroscope

Urbanite: Skin

for Gregory Flynn Ehrhardt

Above all, in a universe ruled by entropy, drawing inexorably toward greater and greater disorder, how does order arise?

James Gleick, Chaos

Contents

Acknowledgments

I

Chaos Theory

Shark Teeth

Winter Funeral

Ghost Story

His Name Here

Girls at the Bus Depot

Bed Rest

Underwear Girl

Coastal

First Word in a Time of Mourning

Extraction

Burial at Shanidar

Spring Planting

Ceres

II

Strange Attractor

Thanatosis

Trilobites

Road Trip

Burning Trash

Domestic Nude 11

Closet

After Electro-Convulsive Therapy

Summer 1985

While our father is hunting rocks

The Spectroscope

When I Was a Girl

III

Meditation on Entropy

Snapshots

Physics Lesson

Separation

Remains

Final Theory

Erosion

Skin

Love Story

Last Anniversary

Maxwell’s Demon

Meditation on Divorce During Summer Storm

Bottom Dwellers

Havoc