Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon

by Ray Hsu

A long-awaited new release from Ray Hsu.

Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon, the follow-up to Ray Hsu’s award-winning first collection, Anthropy, is the second book in a prospective trilogy that explores the “grammar of personhood.”

Whereas Anthropy approached the human condition through the prism of first-, second- and third-person perspectives, Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon uses the grammatical concepts of singular and plural as grid-lines to chart contemporary life and concerns both harrowing and humane. Extending from this principal division, Hsu explores the borders between civic engagement and domesticity, dissent and accord, freedom and restriction—each of these are tested against another and framed by the tension between the collective and the individual. With Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon, Ray Hsu presents our landscape in stark light, confronting the human drama that is manifesting within our lives, and investigating how we make sense of ourselves and the world we have wrought.

Ray is a friend of mine from the University of Toronto. We both studied English and were neighbors for several years.