the thin bridge – book launch

In 2013, I was surprised and honoured to be announced the winner of the annual Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize. This coming Friday September 5th, the resulting collection – “the thin bridge” – will be officially launched.

If you’re in Melbourne, please come along to Collected Works Bookshop, Nicholas Building, 1st floor, 37 Swanston Street – arrive at 6pm for a 6.30pm start. Prof Kevin Brophy will do the honours of breaking the literary bottle against the hull of these poems (UPDATE – Kevin’s insightful and wry launch speech is now available on the brilliant ecopoetics site Plumwood Mountain).  If you can’t make it, copies of the book are available from the publisher (note there are only 200 copies, each one signed and numbered).

Some quotes about “the thin bridge” from two fine poets I admire –

From Libby Hart – “At once fragile and “super strength”, these poems weave, knit and braid silence and song—words spoken and unspoken that flourish into breath, muscle and flesh, into ‘strange and beautiful bodies’ to house endurance and desire in, as well as the ‘intimate and ordinary’.”

From Barry Hill – “Out of a stigmatizable body, Andy Jackson offers us a book of beautifully made poems—burning nerves forensically handled. They issue from a fraught compassion and self-regard, and a resistance to mechanical measures of the interior.”