Cirrus@Austlit

'The poetry of Andy Jackson not only inhabits and is rooted in the liminal space of the body, but is used as a site to consider selfhood, subjectivity, language, form, and bodily difference. Using poetry as a generative practice, Jackson expresses the unsettledness of being in his own body. Jackson has the hereditary genetic disorder, Marfan Syndrome, where the body is unable to correctly produce the protein fibrillin-1, which in turn affects the connective tissue, the heart, the spine, and the joints. On his blog, Among the Regulars, Jackson describes his body of work as ‘poetry, from a body shaped like a question mark’.1 A pronounced spinal curvature means that Jackson inhabits his body in a particular way, and in turn marks his use of language in a particular way. He is explicit about this: ‘I would argue that to begin to unravel how the body is implicated in poetry will illuminate and liberate both’.2 In rewriting the language of the body, Jackson engages in a poetics of the threshold — the threshold being the nexus between selfhood, subjectivity, and the body, both the individual body and the collective body. He does this by renovating form (language) and by interrogating (his own) disability.' (Introduction)