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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.

Unravelanche
(Broken Sleep, 2021) • 34pp

Buy from publisher

A blizzard captured on photographic plate. But no ordinary blizzard. In the far north, a library stands fused with a towering ice shelf. As it melts, it turns into a storm of print – one which the ice pilot seeks to capture with her ancient camera. As she advances, she becomes ever more entombed in a tempestuous anthology.

Unravelanche is made up of ‘snowstorm poems’, or ‘snowems’: swirling collages formed from the billow and surf of other books, woven into a very short, very simple story.

“In The Snow Queen, Hans Christian Andersen writes of a boy imprisoned at the north pole, who must form the word 'eternity' from fragments of glistening ice before escape is possible. Jon Stone's 'snowems' boldly create new stories out of a precipitation of literary fragments, transporting us into parallel library enclaves. Unravelanche is a subtle and brilliant unpicking of the archetypes of polar exploration.” – Nancy Campbell, author of The Library of Ice

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

site by jon