Books

Chaos Theories

The poems in Elizabeth Hazen’s debut collection, Chaos Theories, spring from a unique fusion of science and art in the writer’s heart and mind. In these elegant and often elegiac poems, Hazen explores how our lives, despite our best intentions, can spiral out of control, forcing us to wrest meaning from our own mistakes, as in these lines from “Burning Trash”:

…you who are so taken
by the promise of destruction, so watchful
for what lies beyond your father’s woods: the pull
of the future like a girl, naked
and certain. It is time for you to learn:
not all fires can be contained…

Hazen displays a complex, haunting sense of self as an entity that both longs for and resists connection. In her close observation and shimmering transformation of the details of everyday life, Hazen proves herself to be, as Henry James wrote, someone “on whom nothing is lost.”

In the world of Chaos Theories, science functions as both information and consolation, a way of untangling confusion, of seeing more clearly and cleanly. Elizabeth Hazen is a poet who understands that we are all searching in various ways to make order of our lives and loves, and who, like a contemporary Virgil, leads us through the darkness and to the light.

Alan Squire Publishing · Elizabeth Hazen

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Reviews:

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.

Alan Shapiro, author of Reel to Reel and Night of the Republic

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.

Michael Collier, Director, The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, author of An Individual History and Dark Wild Realm

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.”

Jehanne Dubrow, author of Home Front and The Arranged Marriage

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.

Dora Malech, author of Say So and Shore Ordered Ocean

[Elizabeth Hazen] gets right to the point, the heart of the matter. And there is indeed a great deal of heart to the matter.

Charles Rammelkamp, Compulsive Reader

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.

Richard Peabody, Editor, Gargoyle Magazine

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.

Kevin Holton, Pleiades: Literature in Context

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.

Jane Satterfield, author of Her Familiars and Assignation at Vanishing Point