Eyes squeezed closed against the light, my muscae volitantes suggest minor figures from my past. Here’s the schoolmaster displacing his shame through brute force, the nurse heaving wheelchairs through endless bright corridors, the horse and rider ghosting through the abandoned quarry, the pianist bending into pure melody and quivering like a nun in an ecstasy of revelation. And as I concentrate, each mouth sprouts a phylactery like a medieval wall painting that hangs in memory long after the church has been reduced to ruins. All things pass, they say in neat Anglicana Formata, yet all things remain. Remember that old man, steaming through the city on his boneshaker bike, grimacing like a gargoyle in his academic tweeds? Remember that girl, slim and straight as a reed, diving off the high board but never reaching the water? I do and I don’t, and although I know that none of this is real, and it wouldn’t matter even if it was, I hold every one of them close to my heart, and wish I could remember just one of their names.

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”