rebecca hazelton

Gloss is Rebecca Hazelton’s latest book of poetry, published by the University of Wisconsin’s press.

“These poems are wise, sexy, well-tuned language machines, full of stinging humor and quick-witted swagger, interrogating the highs and lows of cohabitation and maturation. Simply put, Gloss is masterful―a knockout collection I will continue to read, teach, and learn from for years to come.”―Marcus Wicker, author of Silencer

“A masquerade ball of velvety self-portraiture and a subversive parade of cultural norms recast as light kink. This book playacts its anxieties―gender roles and group texts, suburban mansions and contractual commitments―until the violence that underpins them is spotlighted on stage.”―Emilia Phillips, author of Empty Clip

“Funny, irreverent, and searingly honest, Hazelton dares to explore the obligations that we have with one another and with ourselves. And who wouldn’t want to trust the speaker of these poems? In prickly, worldly, and intimate poems, Hazelton’s wit and wisdom urge us to understand beauty in our complicated lives.”―Oliver de la Paz, author of Post Subject: A Fable

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If you—your charismatic, beautifully erotic self—had died young, your ghost would count itself fortunate to have lived, loved, and flamed-out in the company of the wildly imaginative author of VOW. But it's not just ghosts who find themselves envisioned, en-fabled, sometimes horrifically, in these poems: An ex-husband, ex-lovers, and dear friends also populate these questioning, often darkly humorous lyrics. Like them, the future unsettles you because you have taken vows, too, and broken them. Take heart, you hold in your hands the poetic manual for how to proceed.

Buy Vow.

Fair Copy, by Rebecca Hazelton, is a meditation on the difficulties of distinguishing the real from the false, the copy from the original. It explores the differences between our conception of love and the messy reality. If "true" love is not to be found, is an approximation a "fair" substitute?

Composed of acrostics from lines by Emily Dickinson, the collection retains a direct and recurrent tie to Dickinson's work, even while Hazelton deftly branches off into new sonic, rhythmic, and conceptual territories.

Buy Fair Copy here.

Brittany Cavallaro and Rebecca Hazelton began with the proposition that the opposite of a dream song might be waking speech. Or a sleepless anthem. Or wakeful silence. Then they reversed that notion, and reversed it again. Through an intrepid, always devoted, often cheeky engagement with John Berryman’s The Dream Songs, the 26 poems in No Girls No Telephones strike out for an unmapped horizon where ruined fairy stories, dreams, and self-deception all collide in a perfect storm of “the possibility of Past and Perfect” and “the certainty of the Now and New.”

These poems are no mere act of homage. Suggestive of the brittle aspirations, illusions, and delusions that permeate our everyday lives, No Girls No Telephones invites us into a world where, “naïve on the rim / of a glass teacup” men and women exist at odds with one other and with a frighteningly indifferent, fiercely beautiful world.

Buy No Girls No Telephones here.

"Just enough knife, just enough feather—Rebecca Hazelton's Bad Star cuts and caresses with masochistic precision in this brilliant dissection of modern love. I would say to potential readers: take a deep breath and see how far you can go."—Allison Benis White

"Bad Star is a gripping, lyric noir that chronicles the travails of a clear-eyed femme fatale we root for despite, or because of, her love of 'small violences/ which swoon her silent/ and unafraid." Hazelton recasts a tale of star-crossed lovers with a fierce intelligence, a profound exploration of eroticism, and a music so exquisite it carries us through from violence to radiance: 'what joy,/ to feel opened up/ to wonder…to have the real/ fear at last.'"— Katy Didden

Buy Bad Star here.

Coeditors Rebecca Hazelton and Alan Michael Parker have put together a fabulous new book, The Manifesto Project, with forty-seven poets as contributors. Each of the entries–a few of which were co-authored–contains a new manifesto written expressly for the volume, and is accompanied by two of the author’s poems selected by the poet. The University of Akron press has done the rest of the work, publishing this fine volume in February of 2017. The cover’s by the inestimably brilliant Felicia van Bork.

Buy The Manifesto Project here.