Andy Jackson is an award-winning poet whose work has been critically acclaimed - in fact

Askew by Andy Jackson is the Australian poet’s first book since winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with Human Looking.

We're looking forward to celebrating the release of Askew in The Garden Room at Buda House and hope you can join us.

About Andy Jackson :

Andy Jackson’s first collection, Among the Regulars, was shortlisted for the 2011 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry; in 2020 his collection Music Our Bodies Can’t Hold was shortlisted for the John Bray Poetry Award. He has featured at literary events and arts festivals in Ireland, India, the USA and across Australia, and has co-edited disability-themed issues of the literary journals Southerly and Australian Poetry Journal.

Andy Jackson works as a creative writing teacher and tutor for community organisations and universities.

About the Book :

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.

In this luminous tale of hope in the midst of darkness, Pip Williams expands the world of her bestselling novels, The Dictionary of Lost Words and The Bookbinder of Jericho. Sensual and sophisticated, The German Ward is a book about desire and shows one of Australia’s most significant writers reaching the height of her skills.