2024 Sleeplessness by Hetherington, Paul NEUF

Sleeplessness renders and explores its speakers insomnia for the hours between three a.m. and the early morning, presenting a captivating series of reflections on love and desire, language, reading, identity and intersubjectivity. The series of four extended and interlinked poetic sequences moves meditatively and laterally, often in astonishing ways, translating a world of ideas and associations into sensuous language.

The poems foreground the beguiling, if troubling, problematics of interpersonal connections and the challenges involved in translating an individuals own experiences-and their experiences of another-into authentic ways of saying and understanding. These poems continuously approach the ineffable, sitting at the boundary between bodily knowledge and languages attempts to catch and name, transforming the idea of in-betweenness into a thrilling threshold between intimacy and strangeness, ardour and uncertainty, and speaking and silence. Night in these poems becomes a doorway into a state of becoming, generating a language that connotes a condition of perpetual and seductive inquiry, asking the reader to understand themselves newly through the act of reading.