Beautiful Anxiety

The Beautiful Anxiety continually breaks across boundaries of the intimate and the global in an invigorating and unsettling mix of materialist and speculative writing on the interconnectedness of life amidst the environmental and cultural turmoil of the 21st century. The poems are in turn provocative, tender, impatient, playful, and swerve through the world, awake to its lostness as well as its ‘flesh and spark’.

This is surely a break-through book. Jill Jones has compressed her lyric awareness into an exacting and low-key brilliance: alert, astute, unsentimental, and with a linguistic intelligence so sharp in its inner and outer registers I kept asking myself: how is she doing it? There is incisive balance between the sensory and the fugitive, yet her images and figures are so crisp they feel more real than so-called reality. - Philip Salom

Jill Jones’ The Beautiful Anxiety, dedicated to the memory of her mother, joins elegiac witness to ‘another flow’. Her sparse ‘ruined lyrics’ expand into ‘something planetary’. Sensate poesis unfolds ‘genres of dust’; the ghosts of Voss, Sappho and Messaien appear. The Beautiful Anxiety dwells in the imminence of loss, its ‘vast frontier’ and scope. - Kate Lilley

Jill Jones’ poetry attains a Newtonian clarity by occasioning objects to collide with displaced emotion, breaking new ground through the estranging effect of coupling wonder with wryness. This book is an intense celebration of that subcutaneous disturbance often only present in the most acute poetic sensibilities. - Brian Castro