Everything Awake

Everything Awake was written during a dreamy, disorienting period of insomnia. In the middle of the night, I began studying Catullus, imagining that his hendecasyllabic rhythms might shush me to sleep. Instead, they prompted a series of eleven-line poems with eleven syllables per line. I was drawn to the number, via Catullus, because it felt both excessive and insufficient, just like the space of an insomniac's day. Eleven opened up onto an expanse in which I could think about dwelling, in a day, at the foot of a wind-swept mountain, in a family of humans, animals and plants, all of whom needed my care. Like Catullus's neoteric poems, these poems attempt to bring the private, domestic space to bear upon the larger, public sphere in hopes that each might inform the other. The assumption of these poems is an ancient one-our most basic daily acts of care, and our most intimate relationships, define our relationship to the larger world. My hope is that these poems might offer one humble account of care in our deeply damaged world. "In Steensen's verse the elusive "seam between dawn and dreams" is luminous, tenderly sewn into gardens of quiet, tucked between tumultuous days and nights. When we find ourselves sleepless, when there is "no feed," when we are "out to sea" her poems are rowboats, groves, refuge. In Everything Awake the known gives birth to the unknown and brings us closer not only to lucid dreams, but to the necessity of lucid wakefulness. This beautiful book provides solace for the unmoored, not by providing fixity, but by reminding us that the lens of the sacred is made of consciousness, excludes nothing, and is always curious." -Laynie Browne

Harald Voetmann’s eye-opening English debut, Awake, is the first book of his erudite, grotesque, and absurdist trilogy about mankind’s inhuman will to conquer nature In a shuttered bedroom in ancient Italy, the sleepless Pliny the Elder lies in bed obsessively dictating new chapters of his Natural History to his slave Diocles. Fat, wheezing, imperious, and prone to nosebleeds, Pliny does not believe in spending his evenings in repose: No—to be awake is to be alive. There’s no time to waste if he is to classify every element of the natural world in a single work. By day Pliny the Elder carries out his many civic duties and gives the occasional disastrous public reading. But despite his astonishing ambition to catalog everything from precious metals to the moon, as well as a collection of exotic plants sourced from the farthest reaches of the world, Pliny the Elder still takes immense pleasure in the common rose. After he rushes to an erupting Mount Vesuvius and perishes in the ash, his nephew, Pliny the Younger, becomes custodian of his life’s work. But where Pliny the Elder saw starlight, Pliny the Younger only sees fireflies. In masterfully honed prose, Voetmann brings the formidable Pliny the Elder (and his pompous nephew) to life. Awake is a comic delight about one of history’s great minds and the not-so-great human body it was housed in.