Ruby Street

I am pleased and gratified that my most recent book, Viva the Real (UQP), has been shortlisted in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards for 2019 . Awards and prizes aren’t obviously the be-all and end-all but they do repay some of the faith the writer (in this case, me) and publisher had in the book. It's a welcome thing, especially as a genre like poetry pretty much gets ignored by book reviewing culture, literary festivals, and the like. The judges say of the book : Viva the Real by Jill Jones is an heroic celebration of the everyday: … For Jones the poem is an artefact freeze-framing thought: she is interested in the connections between the quotidian, attentiveness, and the resourcefulness of the poem to make legible our familiar. … An antidote to distraction, Viva the Real is a marvellous contribution to the poetics of everyday life: it magnifies the moment and resonates long after reading. A couple of years ago on this blog, I posted some thoughts I had about what my...

I think nearly all my most recent writing has something to do with how ‘the local’, gender and intimacy intersect in a kind of ecopoetics. That ‘something’, of course, can take many different forms, however, at least in my mind, remains connected to those ideas, even if tenuously. I’m not exactly sure what a suburban queer ecopoetics might look like, in general, but to my mind, it’s what I’m doing in my own way. In other words, how apparently mundane locations of ecological shifting and climate change/breakdown can figure in a poetry that recollects or reimagines embodied (human and non-human) locatedness and intimacy. If that doesn’t sound too stodgy. It was certainly what I had in mind with my most recent book, last year’s Viva the Real (UQP 2018), as well as in my previous book, Brink (Five Islands Press 2017). And it is what I’ve tried to work through, making the personal even more personal as well as historical (more on this later), in a new manuscript that’s in deve...

So, my next book is scheduled to appear from Five Islands Press some time next year (2017), most likely mid-year. First of all, my thanks to the editorial team at Five Islands for inviting me to publish with them. It was, actually, a surprise, a welcome one of course. It's not the first time I've published with Five Islands. My second book, the now out-of-print Flagging Down Time , came out during the Press's Wollongong-Ron Pretty years in the 90s. Nice to be back in the catalogue. The book, currently titled Brink , will contain poems I've written over a number of years. In fact, in the draft I'm finalising, there are poems published over a decade ago and even a couple whose first drafts happened in the late 1990s, though they have been through many edits since then. One poem consists solely of words and phrases mined from my first and now also out-of-print book, The Mask and the Jagged Star . Brink is, thus, an accumulative book, though there will be fairly re...