HASSAN, Nazareth
Slow mania

“Nazareth Hassan’s devastatingly brilliant Slow mania is a powerful document of senses and sense-making where estrangement and ugliness meets longing and beauty. The artist begins with a photographic sequence: two white-blue sky panels; a shattered glass storefront window; a street gutter clutching leaves, smashed straw sleeves and plastic lids; then snow holding a disassembled red stained chest of drawers. These are the writer’s plinths where form as waste is configured: ‘smoggy breath thru burnt-edged holes tracking acid mucous inside your home.’ Slow mania provokes through enumerative structures, for instance, ‘screening bodies’ who keep a sex club’s gates open only to some: ‘…197 mmm maybe lemme think / 151 yes / 162 yes / 197 ok yes, but keep your shirt on.’ The poet deftly folds human intimacy into interspecies metaphor: ‘The rat torso twitches in agreement. Across / the street, the flies continue to starve,’ where ‘…you’re lost in your own hole: what did you find?’ Hassan attends to this painful search, bearing witness to the disturbingly exultant, offering a radical state of being, in and out of which the stunning and timely Slow mania lives and thrives.”
— Ronaldo V. Wilson

Published by Futurepoem, 2025
Poetry