Hal Coase

Hal Coase is a poet, researcher, and teacher. He has taught at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Sapienza University of Rome, and the American University of Rome. In 2025, he received his PhD in English Literatures, Language and Translation from La Sapienza in cotutelle with the University of Silesia. His thesis examined the afterlife of modernist avant-gardes in the work of Barbara Guest, drawing on archival work at the Beinecke Library. His first scholarly book, Poetics of Atmosphere (forthcoming with Bloomsbury), develops this research and advances a dialogue between New Phenomenology, ecocriticism, and contemporary poetics.

His poetry and translations have appeared in The White Review, PN Review, Pamenar Press, Il Verri, and Venti. In 2024, he was awarded the Harper Wood Studentship for Creative Writing from St John’s College, University of Cambridge. His first collection, Eccolo, was published by Carcanet Press the following year. In 2026, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Kobe Institute for Atmospheric Studies. He is currently working on a creative-critical response to the writing of Sandro Penna.

Drawing on poetic and philosophical accounts of neutrality and withdrawal, this project investigates indifference not as apathy or denial, but as a queer posture that suspends the demand that difference should serve as the animating force of critique and identity. Rather than taking difference as the basis for agency and political life, Coase asks what happens when poets draw our attention to modes of relation that loosen the lines running from bodies to identities, from desire to subject, from distinctiveness to political efficacy.

This theoretical discussion will be grounded in close readings of modern poets who use a series of rhetorical figures — understatement, anticlimax, and breaking-off — which reduce lyric tropes of self-expression, commemoration, and intensity. Focusing on the works of James Schuyler, Eileen Myles, and Renee Gladman, he argues that indifference can afford space and value to what remains unexceptional, forgettable, or happily indistinct.