Work by Elizabeth Hazen

Work samples

There But Not There

This essay, forthcoming in Fourth Genre, describes my experiences working as a model for the late painter, William Bailey.
Poem from Girls Like Us

This is the poem that opens my second poetry collection, Girls Like Us.
Glose sample

This is a sample Glose, with lines taken from Stephen Dunn's "Mon Semblable".
Poems from The Sky Will Hold

This is a selection of eight poems from my forthcoming collection.

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Hazen is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in EPOCH, Shenandoah, Best American Poetry, Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, The Normal School, and other journals. She taught secondary school English for twenty years at independent schools in Baltimore before leaving her role as an educator to work with the team at The Ivy Bookshop and Bird in Hand on book curation and events.

Chaos… more

See 2021 $2,500 Baker Artist Award Winning Portfolio

View Elizabeth's Resume

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The Sky Will Hold Gloses Essays Girls Like Us - Poetry Collection 2020 Chaos Theories - Poetry Collection 2016

The Sky Will Hold

What began as a collection about stepmothers, initially titled "Better a Serpent," has broadened into a collection about motherhood in general, the existential questions that accompany aging -- specifically female aging, and the challenges of finding purpose and meaning in a world that so often feels hopeless. This third collection of poems is now titled "The Sky Will Hold," and is slated for publication with Alan Squire Publishing in 2025.

Gloses

In the past couple of years, I have written a number of poems in an old Spanish form called a glose or glosa. This form takes four lines from an existing poem, and each of those four lines becomes the final line of a ten-line stanza. The sixth, ninth, and tenth lines of each stanza rhyme. One of the reasons I love this form is because it allows for a kind of dialogue with the original poem. I have used lines from very well-known poems like Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" and Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room," as well as lesser-known poems like the one I have included in my portfolio which takes lines from contemporary poet Vijay Seshadri's poem, "Cliffhanging". I love the way working in form is like solving a puzzle; it allows me to explore emotions while adhering to technical strictures and this creates tension I find satisfying. I hope readers do, too!

Glose for My Son

This glose, which takes lines from Elizabeth Bishop's "In the Waiting Room", appeared in issue 16.4 of The Hopkins Review.

Glose for Fathers

This glose, which takes lines from Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays", appeared in issue 16.4 of The Hopkins Review.

After Seshadri's "Cliffhanging"

This is an image of the poem in the literary journal, Smartish Pace. The poem won second place for the Beullah Rose Poetry Prize.

Essays

There are times when the medium of poetry isn’t quite right for what I want to say. In the past several years, I have turned to the essay form in these moments, usually writing and reflecting on themes similar to those that I explore in poems but allowing myself more space on the page and fewer formal restrictions. My most recent essays describe my experiences working as a model for the late painter William Bailey; my experience undergoing Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation for treatment-resistant depression while trying to teach my son to drive; and my complicated feelings about being a stepmother. These essays tend to be meditations on relationships, but also draw inspiration (as do my poems) from science and the natural world.

Girls Like Us - Poetry Collection 2020

My second a poetry collection, Girls Like Us, was published in early 2020. I was able to have the launch party for the book just before everything shut down due to Covid-19. Many of the poems in the collection focus on female identity and the contradictory personas women are expected to embody. The women in these poems both fear and provoke the male gaze, reconciling themselves to the violence that such attentions may bring, and they are in conflict with themselves about their own desires and self-destructive tendencies. Many of the poems also explore themes related to addiction and recovery.

Girls Like Us cover

Cover art by Lindsay Fleming

Politics and Prose Reading, October 2016

Reading at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C. with poets Sass Brown and Celeste Doaks

Chaos Theories - Poetry Collection 2016

From Alan Squire Publishing: "The poems in Elizabeth Hazen’s debut collection, Chaos Theories, spring from a unique collusion of science and art in one poet’s heart and mind. In these often elegiac poems, Hazen explores many forms of love – between children, parents and grandparents; between siblings and friends; between lovers who marry and who divorce. The losses depicted here are explored with a powerful use of poetic language and form, and survival becomes another form of understanding, a way of seeing ourselves and others not as guilty or innocent, good or bad, but as complex, sometimes thwarted beings who are always striving for more wisdom, more empathy, more light. Hazen’s language is elegant, her point of view unflinching, her voice mature and warm.

"Science in these poems is both information and consolation, a way of untangling chaos, of seeing more clearly and cleanly. Hazen is a poet who understands that we are all searching in various ways to make order of our lives and loves, and who crafts poems that can aid us in that search. This is an astonishing debut collection from a poet simultaneously tenderhearted and wise, who brings hard-won and beautifully wrought insights to every page."

Chaos Theories

Grubb Road Book Festival

With Andrew Gifford, publish Santa Fe Writers Project, 2016

Hampdenfest 2016

Hampdenfest 2016 included poetry readings for the first time.

Alan Squire Publish Spring 2016 Launch Party

May 2016 with publisher Rose Solari at the Spring Launch party

Back cover

Chaos Theories back cover