Elizabeth Hazen is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2013, Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, The Normal School, and other journals. Chaos Theories is her first book. Her second book, Girls Like Us, was published in March, 2020.
In the Press
Baltimore Magazine
Kenyon Review
Interview with Grace Cavalieri
Interview with Marion Winik
The Self Interview
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
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 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
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’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 . . . Chaos Theories is a debut fluent in the language of desire, heartbreak, and regeneration.
Jane Satterfield, author of
Her Familiars and Assignation at Vanishing Point
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