Elizabeth Hazen reads "Chaos Theory"
"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." Richard Peabody
"All it takes for things to turn is a blip." The first-page poem from Elizabeth Hazen's debut collection, Chaos Theories, is a rumination on the reductive power of the human mind when facing grief, and the language we have developed in labs and classrooms to facilitate it. Recognizing laws and theories as little webs of possibility, as impossibly complex addenda to what philosophers call causal reasoning, is a sobering experience, especially when the western instinct is toward the unstable separative powers of reason. Reasoning away grief is like prying water from a rock face with your fingernails, but companionship and empathy is as swift as the click of a mouse here
