Jinx by Abigail Parry

Jinx by Abigail Parry

Jinx: A ruinous charm, a quickdraw curse, a knight's move. Abigail Parry's first collection is concerned with spells, and ersatz spells: with semblance and sleight-of-hand. It takes its formal cues from moth-camouflage and stage magic, from the mirror-maze and the masquerade, and from high-stakes games of poker. Jinx asks about the equivocal nature of artifice, and the real mischief that underwrites the trick. The poems deal in forms of influence: in seduction and persuasion, infatuation and obsession. They want to talk about what we submit to, and what we are compelled by. Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018.

These are outstanding poems: constructed like a collection of beautifully made, trick, locked boxes, they are innovative, complex, and lush in their language and textureIn an explosion of gaming we find in the poems etymological digging, rare words, number games, anagrams, hidden shapes - as well as a range of experiments in traditional and contemporary form. This is poetry con brio, ambitious, far-reaching, but using disguise to tell hidden stories of emotion and pain. -- Jo Shapcott
Abigail Parry brings a trickster's delight in instability, not just to the old themes of innocence and experience, but to the shadowed and less commonly charted regions that lie between. Her poems move, and change, rapidly and headily, with a musical springiness that never flags and is all her own. Jinx is an abundant, exuberant, unsolemnly wise, and wholly beguiling first book that marks Parry out as the pace-setter of her generation. -- Christopher Reid

Abigail Parry spent several years as a toymaker before completing a PhD on wordplay. Her poems have been set to music, translated into Spanish, Serbian and Japanese, and performed or exhibited in Europe, the Caribbean and the US. She has won a number of prizes and awards for her work, including the Ballymaloe Prize and an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, Jinx (Bloodaxe Books, 2018), dealt in trickery, gameplay, masks and costume, and was described as ‘a party in a bag’ (Declan Ryan) and ‘vaudevillian sleaze’ (Stephanie Sy-Quia). The book was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Prize for Best First Collection, and named a Book of the Year in The New Statesman (Marina Warner), The Telegraph (Tristram Fane Saunders) and the Morning Star (Kate Wakeling). Her second collection, I Think We’re Alone Now, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2023, and was shortlisted for both the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 and for the English-language Poetry Award (Wales Book of the Year 2024).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781780372341
ISBN 10	1780372345
Title	Jinx
Author	Abigail Parry
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Year published	2018-03-29
Number of pages	96
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.