Cirrus@Austlit

'Jackson’s third book, A Coat of Ashes, published by Canberra’s Recent Work Press, is a contemplation about how the discourses of Daoism (or Taoism), physics and systems theory might be fused through the methodology of poetry. The collection springs from her acclaimed PhD project, which was awarded the Edith Cowan University Research Medal, the Arts and Humanities Research Medal, and the Magdalena Prize for Feminist Research. The accompanying prose component of her thesis offers a rich background of selected writers whose work is imbued by physics or Daoism, as well as her creative approaches to this book.' (Introduction)

Visual poetry

'Paul Bowles said 'whatever one writes is in a sense autobiographical, of course. Not factually so, but poetically so.' The poems here connect with nerves in bodies, pixels on screens, letters in words and the air’s water content. There are unwitting dialogues with texts gone before; texts that have floated into the spaces I travel – online, on a bookshelf, in a dream, a film, another country, on the television.

'I process them < > they process me.

'They mingle with the ways I experience social and political currents (somewhere between solid and liquid: despair and hope). I try things, and sometimes something happens.

'Now, these poems float in this book for you to process < > for them to process you.'

Source: Author's blurb.