Andy Jackson
Askew
“His poems are blistering in their power, wonderfully subtle, objective and with no self-pity.”
Giramondo, 2026
‘A new crip lyric for our unsettled times’, Askew by Andy Jackson is the Australian poet’s first book since winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry with Human Looking.
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.
About the Author
Andy Jackson is a poet, essayist, and lecturer in creative writing at the University of Melbourne. His poetry collection Human Looking (Giramondo, 2021) won the ALS Gold Medal and the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. Andy’s poems are included in the anthologies Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled and Neurodivergent Poets (Bloodaxe, UK, 2025) and Every Place on the Map Is Disabled (Northwestern University Press, US, 2026). He is a co-editor of Raging Grace: Australian Writers Speak Out on Disability (Puncher & Wattman, 2024), and he writes and rests on Dja Dja Wurrung country. His new book Askew is forthcoming with Giramondo in October 2026.