Andy Jackson on his new poetry book Askew

Andy Jackson reflects on Askew (October 2026), his first poetry collection since winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award. Following his exploration of disability and deformity in Human Looking, the poems in Askew widen the lens, to feel their way into the impairments of our ecologies and our dialogues.

These poems arrived gradually out of a range of things I noticed and experienced over the last five years. The way people looked at you when you wore a face mask, especially when the Covid-19 pandemic first arrived. How the Goldfields, Dja Dja Wurrung country, where I live, can seem both devastated and strong. The sudden, unexpected death of a dear friend. How increasingly hard it seemed for people to listen to perspectives and griefs other than their own, especially online. The arrival in my body of various mysterious health issues. The bushfires that came within a few miles of our house.

At some point, it began to dawn on me that all these poems had fatigue in their bones. My fatigue, from the genetic condition I have, and the chronic illness I’ve been recently diagnosed with, is a fundamental constraint not only on my energy, but my creativity and being. 

Yet part of this exhaustion, this feeling not-quite-right, is also shared, is political and existential. None of us can entirely ignore the ongoing ecological crises, wars and conflicts, violences both intimate and global. This too feels chronic, an elegy unfurling into the future. No wonder writing often felt beyond my capacity. 

Yet, even before I was conscious of it, I sensed that constraint might hold some quiet, unexpected potential. Fatigue had me burrowing deep to find some well of rest and persistence, as well as burrowing outward to find community and a measure of groundedness.

I’m fortunate to have the benefit of an array of trusted collaborators, friends and colleagues, and a loving partner. In their creative essaying, I found rungs to climb, energies to be energised by. I wrote ekphrastically, in conversation and collaboration, and in response to poets whose writing embodies new ways of being masculine, of being human and sensitive. 

I also wrote many of these poems under formal constraint, using pre-existing poetic forms but also inventing new forms, such as the aftersongs, where the final word of each line is sourced from albums by musicians and composers who had died in the last five years. All these constraints dredged up movements and motifs I didn’t expect.

With all this in mind, many of these poems test out what it might mean to say ‘you’ or ‘we’ in a poem, instead of just ‘I’. The collection is also ordered so that each poem includes a word from the poem before it, a kind of ecological stitching.

That’s not to say Askew is entirely orderly. There are threads here that don’t obviously connect, that are frayed. The fabric, after all, is off-kilter. 

Andy Jackson
3 July 2026