Andy Jackson is a poet preoccupied with difference, embodiment and solidarity. He has featured at literary events and arts festivals across Australia, in Ireland, India and the USA.
His first published book of poems, Among the Regulars, was shortlisted for the 2011 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry, and his fourth collection, Music Our Bodies Can’t Hold, which consists of portrait poems of other people with Marfan Syndrome, was shortlisted for the 2020 John Bray Poetry Award.
Andy’s most recent poetry collection is Human Looking (Giramondo, 2021), which won the ALS Gold Medal and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, as well as being shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. These autobiographical and biographical poems speak with the voices of the disabled and disfigured, in myth, art, history and the present moment. They’re visceral and intimate, they comfort and discomfort at the same time – empathy for the other seems to falter, only to expand and deepen.
Andy works part-time as a lecturer in poetry and creative writing at The University of Melbourne.
The poems in this sharp and brilliant collection pay sustained and loving attention to the human form… [They] 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, ALS Gold Medal 2022
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 fierceness and vulnerability 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
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In 2019, Andy’s creative PhD thesis, Disabling Poetics: Bodily Otherness and the Saying of Poetry, was awarded a Doctoral Research Medal for Outstanding Academic Achievement by the University of Adelaide. He has co-edited disability-themed issues of the literary journals Southerly (with David Brooks) and Australian Poetry Journal (with Jennifer Harrison). Andy works as a creative writing teacher and mentor for universities, libraries and community organisations, and he is a Patron of Writers Victoria.
He has had around 200 poems published in a variety of prestigious and obscure journals, as well as newspapers and radio (including The Age, The Saturday Paper, and ABC Radio National), at the Final Ceremonial Sitting of the Disability Royal Commission, and in six editions of The Best Australian Poems. Andy has been awarded grants from the Australia Council, Copyright Agency and Arts Victoria, and been the recipient of an Australian Society of Authors mentorship. He has been awarded residencies from Victorian Writers Centre (now Writers Victoria), Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre (Perth) and Asialink.
Other books include the thin bridge, which won the 2013 Whitmore Press Manuscript Prize, and Immune systems, a semi-fictional verse novella on medical tourism, coupled with a series of ghazals on India, which was released by Transit Lounge in 2015. In 2016, a chapbook – That knocking – was published by Little Windows.
Among the regulars and The thin bridge are both out of print, but the other books are available from your local bookstore, direct from the publishers, or online (including from Readings).
A collaborative puppetry-poetry performance with Rachael Wenona Guy entitled Ambiguous Mirrors won the City of Yarra Award for Most Innovative Work at the Overload Poetry Festival in 2009. In 2017, a further collaborative performance work with Rachael Wenona Guy and Leonie Van Eyk, Each Map of Scars, premiered at the Castlemaine State Festival. Featuring live performance, puppetry, stop-motion animation and poetry, this work was also performed at the Queensland Poetry Festival.
Andy has the genetic condition Marfan Syndrome, and currently lives on Dja Dja Wurrung country, and acknowledges their continuing custodianship and connection to the land.
ABC-TV 7.30 PROFILE
Raveen Hunjan produced this story for the ABC on Andy’s poetry, which aired in April 2023 – https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-10/meet-award-winning-poet-andy-jackson/102206550
MORE QUOTES
The incision or lines the poet’s (metaphorical) ink makes on the page might just as easily be the scalpel, flaying open the boundaries between self and other, language and body, personhood and nationhood… His bodies of works discover again and again that body and composition cannot be separated.
– Molly Murn (Social Alternatives 40.3, 2021)
So scholarly without the vanity, the poems feel as intimate as if you had naturally written them and dreamt them up all by yourself, no doubt of it. In a way, they are conversational, but mostly they are reflective and witness-poetics that are composed in order to get what foulness you have to look at, and what inspiration. Let us hope that Andy Jackson scores every prize there is for poetry, not just in Australia, where poetry seems not all that possible due to our ministers not reading any of it, but in every country where art is seen as higher than the latest machine-gunning.
– Barry Dickins, Arena Magazine
Deep and experienced, accessible and challenging, Human Looking casts honestly filtered light on our bodies. How we see them, respond to them and how we live within them, this collection is dimensional in its lyricism and form. An undeniably potent collection ‘tenderly sketched’ by its creator.
-Judges, Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry 2022
This is a poetry in which seemingly contradictory attributes are embodied. Lyric beauty combines with an unflinching gaze, self-assuredness with vulnerability, awareness of minute bodily gesture with existentialist questionings… ‘Among the Regulars’ is a distinctive, impressive and thought-provoking collection. By asking the reader to step into the body of another, it challenges us to consider the impact of assumptions of ‘normality’ on the individual. Ultimately though, it is the presence of Jackson himself breathing through the lines which makes this such a moving work.
– Debbie Lim, Mascara Literary Review
With an authorial intensity to match [Jill] Jones, Andy Jackson’s that knocking delivers the most knockout opening of a poem I’ve read this year… Staccato lines crack, cajole and wound the textual body back into the physical… Poetry of such a brutal order might nearly be up to facing the ‘truth’.
Lucy Van, Cordite Poetry Review
As director of the festival, all poets are my favourite children, but a special mention needs to go to Andy Jackson who along with Genevieve and her trusty harp Jezebel, and David Splatt on saw, absolutely knocked the socks off the punters at the Edinburgh Castle. Coburg never sounded so good.
– Luis Gonzales Serrano, Director, Overload Poetry Festival
Heartbreaking but controlled… parables, hymns and moving observations of relationships between people and then between the poet and himself or him-selves… Poem upon poem, the reader is confronted by the political and private (one is the other, here), then forcefully invited to take notice of those things from which we often shy away. It combines passion, originality and a control of form. He eloquently, emotionally tells his own story while never letting these strong emotions override the poetry – he is in total control of his matter. It is an intelligent but accessible collection.
– Judges, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, 2011
A polished and assured collection, so radiant with insight and sureness of touch that it’s impossible to remain unmoved. Andy Jackson has the uncanny knack of seeing humanity, like a burning filament, underneath what appears at first mundane. His poems, like beautifully shaped pieces of music, change melody and cadence but always resonate, coming to us out of pools of silence to show us the pathos in difficult conversations, late night drinks with friends, sexuality, grief, and an extraordinarily acute awareness of physicality and mortality. They’re poems that disarm you with their gentleness while refusing to flinch from what’s there.
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.
Andy Jackson 
Andy, great to hear from you! i guess you heard from Mandy that we bumped into her at St. Andy’s mkt recently. i asked her for your details as i haven’t heard a fart from you since you closed GMC!
reading your notes shoots memories across my brain from when i visited with Bronya in 2000, but i won’t patronise you with snippets of my short visit.
i would love to catch up with you in feb when you get back. let me know if you want to do that. i believe Mandy sent you my details….. let me know if you need them again.
i’ve never done a blog b4 (blog virgin) and i feel like such a nerd doing it, but here goes.
take care, my old friend.
thom
Would be good to catch up when I get back, for sure, Thom. And, no, it wouldn’t be patronising at all – I’d be so interested in hearing what India seemed lke to you. Feel free to post here, or email me. Hope you’re well.
good one. looking fwd 2 it.
i’m off to cambodia on the 12th of feb and will contact you when i get back…
great to hear from you.
thom
Hey Andy,
I found you through Graham’s compiling of Stylus’ Street/Life edition (I’ve got a couple in there as well) and I think ‘Ghazal’ is phenomenal.
I’ve subscribed here to keep up with what you do. Looking forward to seeing more!
– Jeremy
Cheers, Jeremy. I love the free-wheeling engaged philosophical tone of “… William St Brigade”. Now I have to actually blog! 😉
AJ, i’ve lost your no. call me or send me your details again, please.
ta mate
Hi Andy,
Thank you for your comments.
What’s it like at Catherine Susannah?
KSP so far has been great – it’s under a flight-path and near the freeway, but it’s nestled among trees and near a National Park. I’m in a cottage behind the Writers Centre, so I can be busy writing, but also drop in on writers groups, sit in the library or whatever – it feels like the human-writer balance is healthy. The KSP people are sincere and amateur in a good way. I’ll probably blog more in detail on the experience once it’s over, late Aug. Cheers!
Hi Andy,
I was at Perth Poetry Club today, and bought your last copy of Among the Regulars (have already read most of it and love your writing). Your poetry is beautiful.
I’m contacting you because you left a sheet of notes in the book, and there are some numbers on it that I thought you might want/need.
Let me know if you do.
Cheers,
Pat
Tried to send you an email but it didn’t seem to work. Anyway, yes, if it’s not too much of a hassle, could you send it to me c/- KSP Writers Centre? Thanks so much for your comments! Regards, Andy.
hey Andy,
just found this site on monday and found it to be so wonderful and also an ability to say hello as well..I could keep in touch! but I was at school and didn’t have the time then to write
….. so tonight nursing a migraine bod and Rach out catching up with sam..I thought I would look you up again..and there was a new posting!!!
feel like I can get to know you in a whole new way so that will be a treat.
big hug
melinda
hi Andy,
I saw you get off the train today at flinders street and yelled out to you when you reached the bottom of the stairs, yeah just thought i would inform.
– kayla.
Yes Andy, I would like to do a workshop with you!
Eva
Hi Andy, sounds like you are having an amazing time in India. Wow. I wanted to contact you to discuss an idea for a panel at the WordStorm / AP Festival in Darwin in May 2012. Email me when you have a moment and I will send you the details. Cheers – melinda (George Dunford’s friend / AP Newcastle Symposium Tweeter-er)
Hi Andy.. I actually found your blog via an advertisement for an Australian Poetry workshop that you are running later this year. I had some questions about it and despite contacting AP I haven’t had any success. So here I am leaving a little question about your online workshop “Poetry of the Body” on your blog! I am what you might dub a ‘poetry punter’, but have oft wondered about the question of how shared emotion is engendered in art despite the lack of shared experience.. Can you tell me whether it’s okay to get involved in your workshop despite being a complete poetic novice? -Kat
The comments at the top of the page are fab and deserved but I wish Quasimodo was the first thing I could see when I refresh the page.
It is the most beautiful piece of poetry I have ever read.
The self-effacing me wants to say “oh you should read more poems then!”, but I’ll shove him aside and just say “thankyou so much”. It’s a fantastic thing to think someone has been affected by your writing.
I will read more… and more. On another brief note as I know you are not an info kiosk, there is supposedly a good regular place for people who want to ease in to reading poetry out loud? Do you know it? btw, we shared a class about 12 years ago.. at RMIT I think. Annerliegh
Hi Andy,
Just stumbled upon your site from your poems in the current issue of Wordgathering. I absolutely loved them (“Desensitized” in particular spoke to the disillusioned patient in me.) Really enjoying your blog as well, intriguing thoughts. I just wanted to drop you a line to let you know you have a fan in Puerto Rico!
Michelle Fernandez
Thanks Michelle, very happy to hear poems of mine have resonated with people! Wordgathering’s a great journal. Cheers!
Oh, and I know what you mean by disillusioned patient – sometimes I think it’s almost impossible to find a non-disillusioned one! – I find it so ironic that something so personal can be so impersonal…
That would be a different puppetry to the one we saw at a 3RRR celebration then? 🙂
Hello Andy – I bought a ticket for the CHR&RF (Apr 29th). Saw you on the line-up and thought I’d do a bit of research. Are there any bookstores in Melbourne stocking your work that you’d recommend?
Sorry, old school – prefer to flip through a book in hand before I purchase. Images on an online bookshop just don’t cut it.
Many thanks
Wolfe
Thanks Wolfe, and I totally get it – I’m tactile when it comes to books too. I always recommend Collected Works, 1st floor Nicholas Building on Swanston St in Melb, for poetry. I’m also fond of Brunswick Bound on Sydney Road. Apart from these, any independent bookshop should have (or be able to order in) my book “Immune Systems” (it has national distribution through the publisher Transit Lounge, whereas the others are direct through the publisher so they have slightly less chance of being there). Of course, I’ll also be bringing books to the festival. Looking forward to it; I’m in fine company. Cheers, A.
Hello again
Saw you at the festival today – should have been more poets there, the Sandy & Andy show was the highlight. Many thanks for signing my copy of ‘that knocking’. Which one of your books contains a goodly amount of poems about love? The one you read at the festival was absolutely beautiful
Kindest of Regards, Wolfe
Thanks Wolfe, so glad you enjoyed our session (I did too!). I almost always think festivals should have more poetry. If you’re interested in the love poems, probably “The thin bridge” would be the one. They all include one or two, though that one has three or four. It’s not a major theme in the poetry, but certainly a major theme in my life. Hopefully see you again up in Christmas Hills.