Hawkey completed graduate work at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he founded and edited the first 10 issues of the poetry journal jubilat.
In 2012 he founded, with Rachel Levitsky, the Office of Recuperative Strategies (OoRS), a research-oriented collective of activists that explores new tactics to promote the reuse, perversion, reanimation, and reparation of precarious, outmoded, and correctable cultural phenomena.
At this interstice of domestic routine, historical accounts, and linguistic collision, readers are forced to navigate the razor’s edge of political contingency and the cultural border crossings (re: invasions) inherent in language use for global citizens.
Right justified, the lines visually resemble a competitive Jenga tower, and the constant tonal shifts, fragmentary sentences, and lingering phrases mimic the fragility of language’s reliability.
As Hawkey indicates in the Acknowledgements page, Sift arose out of an invitation of the New Museum’s Temporary Center for Translation and an engagement with an essay by the Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali.