Without resorting to truculence or ridicule—easy positions to take—Hazen turns her keen eye and knowing heart to the pressures placed on women of all ages in our benighted culture.
Girls Like Us is a truly amazing work of poems. The raw emotions combined with the true and often sad realities the poems capture of life connect with readers on an intimate level
A roller-coaster of ups and downs, triumphs, fears, wholeness, self-doubt, self-destructions and many other things girls and women face.
This book of poems feels like a delicious slice of self-care. Elizabeth Hazen commiserates with us on how we women have been spoken down to, ignored, and hurt, and how she frames it all on the page is a thing of beauty.
This is a great collection that both absolves and enhances the reader’s own obsession with popular television.
Chaos Theories, Elizabeth Hazen’s startling collection, refashions insights and principles from the hard sciences into metaphors for what it means and feels like to be alive and conscious, needy and loving, in a universe ruled by time and change. With plainspoken elegance, these poems, individually and collectively, comprise a memorable and heart wrenching evocation of the persistent and often contradictory needs that both sustain and menace the attachments that define us.
When Elizabeth Hazen declares, “I want to understand our need/for headway,” it’s significant that she offers an image for progress, motion, or time, and it’s also characteristic of this poet’s “need” to ground her ideas in the body, which she tells us, “holds more mysteries/than the mouth can bring itself to speak.” And yet she does find speech for the mysteries and paradoxes of existence, speech she puts down in expertly cadenced lines that “produce the proper notes” of a restless imagination looking to find the “absent whole” in human experience.
In Chaos Theories, Elizabeth Hazen explores the “instabilities” of the human heart through the organizing impulses of poetry, which work to make sense, make order of memory, desire, and regret. This is a book of bodies and tongues but also of bright intellect, the mind scientific here, methodical and beautiful in its efforts “to narrate, fit events to plot.”
In Chaos Theories, time haunts us with decisions and memories, but time also reveals the world’s recursive wonders, if we can only look and listen as Hazen teaches us to do.
[Elizabeth Hazen] gets right to the point, the heart of the matter. And there is indeed a great deal of heart to the matter.
Liz Hazen’s Chaos Theories is a dynamo that will alter your genetic structure and boost your intelligence. She rides into town like Athena on the horns of a Minoan bull, waving a cure for cancer in one hand and the rules of romance in the other. She harnesses the atoms and molecules of poetry like a Tesla coil, attuned to the science of our everyday lives, and leaves us sadder, wiser, and the better for it. So drink up. She’s the real deal and this is a shocking book filled to the brim with electric eels.
Chaos theory, a mathematical field studying deterministic randomness, is built on the notion that even without new variables, a tiny change in a given system can have massive effects on the outcome. Chaos Theories, by Elizabeth Hazen, puts the every day minutia of human existence into such terms, analyzing the consequence of a single missed alarm, one missing person out of billions in a time of massive population growth, or a moon that never formed.
Elizabeth Hazen’s unflinching first book, Chaos Theories, forms a powerful meditation on female identity and the cultural expectations that daughters, mothers, wives, and sisters resist and embrace. For Hazen, fate—familial or biological—is a form of magnificent havoc that reflects both the natural world’s lush beauty and the realities of science. A debut fluent in the language of desire, heartbreak, and regeneration.