Askew

Book launch: Thurs 8 Oct at Readings Emporium (VIC)

Special offer: two books by Andy Jackson

‘A new crip lyric for our unsettled times’, Askew by Andy Jackson is the Australian poet’s first book since winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with Human Looking.

Following his acclaimed exploration of disability and deformity in Human Looking, the poems in Andy Jackson’s new collection Askew widen the lens, to feel their way into the impairments of our ecologies and our dialogues. How might our world itself be disabled? How can we live together within this reality?

These poems use an array of established and invented forms – sonnet, pantoum, erasure, prose poem, ghazal, cento and more – turning them to unusual effect under the pressure of our collective grief and bewilderment. They face the extinction and climate crises, the distortions of social media division, the fracturing of solidarity in the wake of the Covid pandemic, and the problems of masculinity with undaunted tenderness. They express, with an extraordinary intensity, the sense of vulnerability, both as human, and as poetic value.

Engaging in aslant conversation with musicians and composers, poets and artists, while reckoning with historical and contemporary thinkers, this is poetry that affirms the value of collaboration and interdependence, with all of its promise and difficulty.

Andy Jackson’s Askew is ambitious and emotionally attuned, as it invigorates form around fragment and the broken, syntax around breath and earth, echo and connection around other voices, image around the damaged body and the world in extremis. As the poems unwind through the said, the sung, the remembered and the dreamt, they tag each other and pass along challenges and difficult questions, confront grief and anger, and in so doing, reveal how grace, courage and love are vital imperatives now. In this cathartic, generous and impassioned book, Jackson powerfully reminds us what poetry can do as the world trembles.
Jill Jones

Original and beautiful, exceptional and radical, Askew proposes collaboration as fundamental to present-day questioning. Poets walk with composers with musicians with visual artists, sonnets with erasures with centos with ‘aftersongs’ (and other dazzling Andy Jackson-invented forms), sharing fresh conversations about empathy and compassion, crises and ecologies, kinship and masculinity, disability and embodiment. In these poems coexist learning and ‘unlearning’, acceptance and resistance, clarity and opacity, fragility and resilience. Tender and bold, cloud-‘soften[ed]’ and bright, playful and serious, intimate and expansive, they teach us to hold ‘care’ and ‘war’, ‘ghost notes’ and ‘cacophon[y]’, and remind us that we can ‘look[…] the other way’ or look straight at the ‘queer’ and ‘strange’. As its cover suggests, Askew is a book of brilliant interconnectedness, and Andy Jackson its marvellous loomsman.
Stuart Barnes

Askew is wholly unafraid and challenges readers to contemplate the politics of mortality and ableism; inseparable in their cause and effect. This collection is for lovers of melancholy, for disability advocates and for those yet to become advocates.
George Banach-Salas, Books+Publishing

Praise for Andy Jackson:

Jackson puts himself on the line in a way few poets dare, and his vulnerability and fierceness are transformative. That’s why he is one of the best – most necessary, most powerful – poets in Australia today.
Maria Takolander

His poems are blistering in their power, wonderfully subtle, objective and with no self-pity.
Judges’ comments, Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

Sharp and brilliant… [Jackson’s poems] provide a more capacious account of the aesthetics and experience of the human body, displacing the ‘normal’ body from the centre of our attention and expanding the possibilities for human looking. Measured and dispassionate in tone, the poems nonetheless burst with anger and joy… With powerful poetic skill and infinite compassion, [Jackson] illuminates the world differently and gives us a new way to see.
Judges’ comments, ALS Gold Medal

Since the publication of his first book… Jackson has been one of the driving forces in Australian disability poetry.
Michael Northen, Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature

Compassion is, and has always been, the distinguishing feature of Andy Jackson’s work…hard-won rather than casual; unflinching rather than sentimental.
Geoff Page, The Australian