Black Rider presents the fifth installment in the Lyrics chapbook series, even if the signal fails by Jill Jones.
Featuring new work as well as previously collected poems in publications such as Outcrop: radical Australian poetry of land (Black Rider Press, 2013), ETZ, and Southerly, this new chapbook of seventeen poems will be free to download from the Black Rider Press website.
Jill Jones has published eight full-length books of poetry, most recently The Beautiful Anxiety (Puncher and Wattman, 2014) and Ash Is Here, So Are Stars (Walleah Press, 2012).
Thanks to Annette Willis for the beautiful cover art “Heads in Clouds”.
What others have said
“Jill Jones is uniquely capable of adjusting the speed and magnitude of your awareness. She shepherds the reader away from expectations s/he may have thought absolute. In “A Moon, a Myth, a Feeler,” Jones recasts sensory perception out of zones of occupation, prompting a natural question, “What sport brought you out here?”. Her casual/causal irony demands precision of thought. Even accidents cease being accidental. Jones’s prowess renders the titular signal moot, replacing it with full belief in a transcendence that relieves the concept of itself.” – Sheila E. Murphy
“The precise and provocative poems collected in even if the signal fails deconstruct the binary opposition between realism and experimentalism effortlessly, presenting the reader with a complex and compelling take on modern life. Jill Jones’ poems are undeniably of our world, of its gritty materiality and linguistic sophistication, but they are far more refractive than reflective. She is both an acute observer of the world of things and an active participant in transforming our perceptions through words. According to the poems in this fascinating new chapbook, she seeks to ‘mend constructed things’ and ‘find truth among tension’. Even if the signal fails is a terrific new addition to this important contemporary poet’s body of work.” – Ali Alizadeh
Am I the Black Rider? Yes. 