I am drifting between two accidents. The first is theological and involves bread and wine, the second is mechanical and involves driving too close on a rain-hammered country lane. Both are equal parts causality and matters of belief, and both, as my late aunt says, are matters for angels. My late aunt, naturally, is sitting here, an angel herself, with a harp she can’t play and a beatific expression she can’t quite pull off. She tells me there’s no such thing as an accident, merely the abnegation of blame by the guilty party, whose sin is compounded by the act in the all-seeing eyes of God. She acknowledges, however, that I’m drifting like a feather from a broken wing, buffeted in the slipstream of a passing lorry laden with bread and wine, though both she and God—who she has under her angelic thumb—are sure as sure can be that it’s all my own damn fault.

Oz Hardwick

is a European poet, photographer, occasional musician, and accidental academic, whose work has been widely published in international journals and anthologies. He has published “maybe 15?” full collections and chapbooks, including most recently with Hedgehog Poetry Press: Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (2024) and My Life as a Time Traveller: A Memoir in 18 Discrete Fragments (2023).

His manuscript Orion Highway won the 2024 Dolors Alberola International Poetry Prize and will be published by Dalya Press in 2025. His poem “Witness Statement” was awarded the 2024 Charles Simic Prize for Poetry. In 2022, Oz was awarded the Arc Poetry Prize for “a lifetime devotion and service to the cause of prose poetry.” His book Learning to Have Lost (Canberra: IPSI, 2018) won the 2019 Rubery International Book Award for poetry.

With Anne Caldwell, Oz edited The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Scarborough: Valley Press, 2019) and Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022); and with Cassandra Atherton, he edited Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Maneuvers (Cheshire, MA: MadHat Press, 2024).

By day, Oz is Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University (UK). In his spare time, he is a respected music journalist. He has held residencies in the UK, Europe, the US, and Australia, and has performed internationally at major festivals and in tiny coffee shops.

Author’s website: https://ozhardwick.co.uk

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Adventures in Experiential Limnology, cheribun by Oz Hardwick in Issue 29 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (August 2025); First Place Winner of MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #3

⚡ The Irresistible Rise of Prose Poetry: Northern Soul Talks to Poet Oz Hardwick, interview by Mark Connors in Northern Soul (9 December 2024)

⚡ Last Ride in the Dead Zone, cheribun by Oz Hardwick in Issue 24 of MacQueen’s Quinterly (August 2024); First Place Winner of MacQ’s Cheribun Challenge #2

⚡ A New Home Beneath the Stars, prose poem in Flash Glass (1 May 2024)

⚡ Oz Hardwick, seven prose poems in The Mackinaw (Issue 1, January 2024)

⚡ Three Poems by Oz Hardwick in Anthropocene (3 August 2022): “Jobs for All”; “The Seaside Line”; and “Absolute Zero”

⚡ Five Stunning Prose Poems by Oz Hardwick in Lothlorian Poetry Journal (23 April 2021): “The Glasnost Legacy”; “Diluvial”; “The Evolutionary Urge”; “Yolo”; and “Heredity”