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“Voraciously experimental, precociously accomplished.” Poetry International

“Multifaceted, mega-fabricated, louche architecture.” Magma

Jon is a Derbyshire-born writer, editor and researcher who specialises in amalgams: hybrids, mixtures, collections and crossovers, of poem and game, fantasy and realism, curation and composition. He writes micro-texts that often take the form of character portraits, nature lyrics or puzzles, and combines them with the work of other writers and artists in genre-blurring anthology books.

Poetry London have called him a “poet of fantastic inversions”, but such inversions are just one way of rethinking the poem as an object of readerly play and investigation. His work has been published in The Sunday Times and performed on BBC Radio 4, as well as appearing in a number of British and international journals. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and the Poetry London prize in 2014 and 2016.

He has also published academic papers in the field of game studies. A monograph, Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Videogames, was published in 2022.

For a fuller account of his approach to writing, with examples, check out the short essay 'On Toys'.

Get in touch: jonskeletone [at] gmail.com. Or subscribe to Stray Bulletin for irregular updates.

School of Forgery
(Salt, 2012) • Poetry Book Society Recommendation

Buy from publisherBuy from bookshop.org

School of Forgery is handily divided into two sections: Originals and Fakes. It’s possible, however, that there might have been some cross-contamination between the two. One or more of the translations of classical and contemporary Japanese poets in the Fakes section may, in fact, be made up. Some lines from the autobiography of Harpo Marx could somehow have found their way into the tale of the bandit Goemon. There are rumours that the liars, hoaxers and plagiarists who are both subject matter and tour guides in the first part have infiltrated the ranks of the dashing heroes and agents of the second. Some of these poems even steal, shamelessly, from each other.

Innocent believers in literary authenticity are advised to take especial care. This work may be, in its entirety, nothing more than a fabrication.

extracts: What Robots Murmur Through Broken Sleep, a collage of dialogue from Naoki Urasawa's Pluto, published on Poetry International; Mustard, republished as part of Meat & Mustard, a digital play-through poem; Adcock Modulations, published on Qarrtsiluni; audio version of two poems from the Tatsunoko sequence, recorded for Selected Poems.
related: Death Daydream Season is published in full in this book, in black and white. Three poems from Scarecrows are also re-published.

Reviews

“The structure of School of Forgery is ingenious and impressively intricate. Its slotting architectures are slit, mortised and battened. (...) I stress-tested their timbre by reading poems aloud and yielded a cadence of genuine feeling within the multifaceted, mega-fabricated, louche architecture.” – David Morley, Magma

“These are poems with an edge, or rather, multiple sharp edges, poems as elaborate ‘fabrications’ challenging conventions of form and voice. This is an inspired, integrated debut, endlessly inventive, with a lively intertextuality and a wide frame of reference. The language is both playful and hard-wrought, words at high voltage, words as collector's items.” – PBS Selectors’ Comments

Available in paperback

More projects

Poems

On Toys

Ludokinetic
Literature

Sandsnarl

Unravelanche

School
of Forgery

Dual Wield

The Hipflask
Series

Whispering
Leaves

Adversary

Headbooks

Scarecrows

Hybardrids

Tomboys

Birdbooks

Super Treasure
Arcade

Death Daydream
Season

Sidekick Books

Core Samples

Riotous

Superminis

The
Mechamorphoses

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