Andy Jackson – June 26 2016

Andy has been a consistent feature of Australian literature for well over a decade and is a landmark of Aussie performance and page poetry. His collection, Among the Regulars, was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize and his poems have appeared in Heat, Going Down Swinging, Island, The Age and Mascara. In 2011 he was an Asialink resident at Chennai, India, where he began a series of poems exploring the medical tourism industry. Andy has a genetic condition called Marfan’s Syndrome, which for him has meant fairly obvious spinal curvature.

Immune Systems
Transit Lounge Publishing, 2015; ISBN 9781921924828
The title suite of poems, a kind of verse novella, explores ‘medical tourism’ in India, from the perspective of a Westerner undergoing surgery and recovery. Through various medical and social interactions, Andy experiences confusion, insight, anger, small epiphanies and the sheer humanity of other bodies. Political and economic problems inherent in medical tourism inform the poetry, but the focus is always the human encounter. Similarly, in a series of ghazals, he reveals how the metaphysical is embodied in the everyday. The larger questions of love, death, body and spirit live in the seemingly ordinary, while the beautifully cadenced verse is grounded by an assured conversational tone. Immune Systems captures and interrogates the complexity of contemporary India with lyric beauty and an unflinching, yet tender, gaze.

The Thin Bridge
Whitmore Press, 2014; ISBN 9780987386649
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. – Barry Hill
… 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’. – Libby Hart