Human Looking

Winner of the Prime Minister’s Literary Award

WINNER: Prime Minister’s Literary Award – Poetry 2022
WINNER: ALS Gold Medal 2022
SHORTLISTED: Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – Poetry 2022

A ground-breaking insight into the experience of disability, from a distinguished poet who has lived with Marfan Syndrome, including severe spinal curvature, and whose poems give voice to those who are often treated as ‘other’ or alien. 

The poems are visceral and intimate, they comfort and discomfort at the same time – empathy for the other seems to falter, only to expand and deepen.

The poems in Human Looking speak with the voices of the disabled and the disfigured, in ways which are confronting, but also illuminating and tender. They speak of surgical interventions, and of the different kinds of disability which they seek to ‘correct’. They range widely, finding figures to identify with in mythology and history, art and photography, poetry and fiction. A number of poems deal with unsettling extremes of embodiment, and with violence against disabled people. Others emerge out of everyday life, and the effects of illness, pain and prejudice. The strength of the speaking voice is remarkable, as is its capacity for empathy and love. ‘I, this wonderful catastrophe’, the poet has Mary Shelley’s monstrous figure declare. The use of unusual and disjunctive – or ‘deformed’ – poetic forms, adds to the emotional impact of the poems.

Brutally honest, without a whiff of self-pity, Human Looking illuminates our bodies and all that is beautiful and difficult about them. These poems have heft, lyrically and emotionally, yet they soar.
Christos Tsiolkas

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

These poems exist as wounds, as ‘perfect riddles’, as desire, as song…looking closely at what we consider to be wholeness and beauty, and their imperfect, sometimes hidden counterparts.
Eileen Chong

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

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, this book illuminates the world differently and gives us a new way to see.Judges’ citation, ALS Gold Medal

Jackson’s book is an extraordinary poetic exploration of his own disability…His poems are blistering in their power, wonderfully subtle, objective and with no self-pity.
Judges’ citation, Prime Minster’s Literary Award