Jill Jones, How To Emerge
Winner of the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards 2026
'What pathways can humans explore to find growth, understanding and even peace? The task for any poet exploring these themes is to proceed free of sentimentality, cliché or proselytisation. How To Emerge navigates these challenges with a combination of lyrical clarity and astonishing imagery. Jill Jones demonstrates an overarching sense of control as the poems unfurl an exploration of both language and lives. There is a quiet, depth-defying resonance throughout the book as it skates between sky, asphalt, weed, wharf, vulnerability and memory.
The possibilities for self are made endless through observation of the infinitesimal and ephemeral. Meaning emerges incrementally through rhythm, image and pause. Jones demonstrates a mastery of catalogue and repetition; with each reconfiguration, the world appears new, providing both answer and question.
Jones masterfully clips fragments of fact, inquiry and observation into a whispered wonder. These poems discover humanity, perhaps even meaning in the accumulating weight of the world; we are star dust, but we are also the brat summer. Part of the appeal of these poems is the rare faith they show in the reader, a belief that readers will find their own meaning and carry from the collection something of the warmth, humour and care that radiates from the poems.'
NSW Premier's Literary Awards judges
How To Emerge, the latest collection from award-winning poet Jill Jones, is filled with visions and ghosts, doubles and shadows. It also explores the living and damaged body, as it dances with humans, birds, animals, leaves, the weather, digital assemblage, sound and song, the elements and the planet. Within this, a self grows into its moment and continues moving beyond itself. Questing and agile, these poems mingle in the world’s imperilled present and its past and future emergencies and losses. The book has an exhilarating and spontaneous sense of passage as the everyday touches everything here: life as it emerges and turns in seasons and trauma, desire and distance, scars and social ecologies, night and day, the music of the world, variations of joy, doubt and grief. As always, Jones’ poems are capacious, haunting and invigorating, as she offers a queer and tactile swerve through the desires and debris of past and present, and the uncanny echoes of our approaching futures.
‘How To Emerge, like all of Jill Jones’s work, exquisitely captures the attention of the heart and the mind. In its artful concern with the interplay between the human and the nonhuman, Jones adds to our understanding of identity as something continuous with, rather than somehow ‘above’, the material world. In addition to its subtle intellectual concerns, How to Emerge further demonstrates Jones’s standing as a master poet, illustrating poetry’s potential in endlessly playful and inventive ways.’ David McCooey
‘Jill Jones’s collection How To Emerge is remarkable as it uses elements of avant-garde poetry but also has a pronounced lyric core, one that in itself both enunciates and problematises the perceiving self, which is at once vigilantly present, perplexed in its own constitution, and content to register externals—that which is not subjective, not even human—without any overarching or hubristic judgment.’ Nicholas Birns, New York University, co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel
Jill Jones lives on Kaurna land. One of her most recent books Acrobat Music: New and Selected Poems was shorted listed for the 2024 South Australian Literary Awards, longlisted for the 2024 ALS Gold Medal and commended in the 2023 Wesley Michel Wright Prize. Other recent books include Wild Curious Air, winner of the 2021 Wesley Michel Wright Prize, and A History Of What I’ll Become, shortlisted for the 2021 Kenneth Slessor Award and the 2022 John Bray Award. In 2015 she won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry for The Beautiful Anxiety. Her work is widely published in Australia and internationally. An entry on her poetry is included in the current edition of The Oxford Companion to Modern Poetry in English. She was, from 2008-2022, Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, University of Adelaide. She previously worked in senior positions in the Australia Council for the Arts, and NSW Ministry for the Arts. She has also been a film reviewer, journalist, and book editor.
Jill Jones, How To Emerge
September 2025. 148mm x 210mm. 96pp.
ISBN 978-1-925735-75-8
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.
