Oz Hardwick, Author at INVERSE JOURNAL

Oz Hardwick

Oz Hardwick is a York (UK)-based writer, photographer and occasional musician, whose work has been published and performed internationally in and on diverse media: books, journals, record covers, concert programmes, fabric, with music, with film, and with nothing but a residual West Country accent. He has published nine poetry collections, most recently the prose poetry chapbook Wolf Planet (Clevedon: Hedgehog, 2020), and has edited and co-edited several more. Oz would love to be bassist in a Belgian space-rock band, but makes do with being Professor of English at Leeds Trinity University, where he leads the Creative Writing programmes.

You’ll Never Recognise Yourself Again — Four Prose-Poems by Oz Hardwick

January 24, 2022 | Poetry

Oz Hardwick presents four prose-poems where a poetic archaeology excavates for meaning in spaces meant for display, where dioramas abound, while a poetic gaze retrieves meaning from objects representing the past in its defunct state. In these poems, one could easily ponder on the museumification of life as the preservation of death, and that too in material overabundance put on display. A poetic voice disrupts the frigid nature of such spaces, turning stillness into motion, and offering sense beyond purpose to elaborate arrangements, but not without necessary critique.

Dislocations: Five Prose Poems by Oz Hardwick

February 6, 2019 | Poetry

UK-based writer, photographer and occasional musician Oz Hardwick brings us five prose poems inspired by the theme of dislocation. These five pieces featured here reflect an inherent desire to transform or rather re-envision everyday life through the poetic craft. The five prose poems published here project the poet’s ability to revisit situations and infuse symbolic value into seemingly ordinary moments to retrieve the hidden profundity from the everyday. The quotidian appears not only as a conduit but also as a catalyst of literary expression, one that the poet explores with greater range by employing his distinctive prose poem style. Hardwick states that these five prose poems are from a “current work on the small dislocations which fissure the surface of everyday interactions.”