The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber

Jay Gao

Book of the Month: September 2026

Reviewed by Sean Wai Keung 

What even are trees? In this single long poem, comprising the entire length of a new book by Jay Gao and Carcanet, we are introduced and reintroduced to possible answers to this question. The phrase ‘bark, archive, splinter’ is repeated, most often as the first line on many of the pages, with the poetry beneath reaching out like roots, exploring each aspect of this holy trinity of tree definitions. Yet, despite this repeated demarcation, it’s a testament to this book that there is never any doubt that all of it belongs to the same divine single poem.

There is a consistent and persistent voice throughout The Dead One… – part stream of consciousness, part death scream – pleading with the reader to follow each of its various strands and narratives while also intentionally creating diversions and distractions to fool and deceive. Because of this, it can sometimes feel like a difficult poem to access, with its myriad lists and long-line images almost overwhelming the reader and demanding maximum concentration. But this is also undeniably part of its success. After all, it’s only through its vastness that each poetic list eventually feels like the repetition of leaves in a crown, each long line a particularly thirsty root digging for water. In a remarkable three-page sequence, we are given a cosmically large list of repeated tree types (‘and birch, and oak, and birch, and chestnut, and birch, and birch, and birch, and birch, and oack…’) followed by an entire page of commas – reminiscent of dew drops or a colony of insects. It’s all a matter of interpretation or translation, which is then mirrored in the content throughout: ‘How long to read the most ordinary sentence in the language you should have known…’ the page asks, both to the reader and to the universe itself.

Tree-as-language is in fact one of the most common themes throughout The Dead One…, and it’s through the use of language that the definition of tree-as-archive becomes clear. The tree(s) of this project are continually both remembering and being remembered, more often than not through dark memories of culture and grief, questioning human concepts of country, time, and life itself. Nature in this poem is not a place of refuge or protection, but rather a memorial to our many follies and conflicts: ‘In this skirmish, hostile to forgetting, you ruin form by injecting a surplus of spare moments into redundant moulds / After nature, the community remains endangered…’

In the past whenever I thought of tree-poetry, the famous opening couplet from Joyce Kilmer’s Trees always came to mind, like an unwanted memory of an advertising jingle from childhood: ‘I think that I shall never see / A poem lovely as a tree’. What Gao has produced in The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber may not at times feel ‘lovely’, but it definitely feels more cosmic, more urgent, and, dare I say, more arboreal. 

The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in Your Ear, Thriving Slumber is published by Carcanet

Sean Wai Keung is a poet, performance maker and food writer based in Glasgow.