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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.

Scarecrows
(Happenstance, 2010)

The varying accounts of a parade of shadowy misfits, some in first person, some more scarecrow than others. Bringing them together: an emerging faith in folkloric prophecy and supersititon, since modernity has left them broken-hearted. A patient of laughingstock surgeon Serge Voronoff attests to his full recovery. Josef the golem abhors the daylight. Batman’s Jonathan Crane is regarded through the eyes of a henchman-for-hire, and the roles of exploitation actress Christina Lindberg assemble into one unwieldy monster-girl. Technological witches fall under suspicion, and the new Doctor Who might be a devil who walks the earth. Plus spells, lies, legends, and the mournful aubade of a salaryman waking from a Satanic orgy. All in 32 pages.

related: Three poems in this pamphlet are republished in School of Forgery.

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More projects

Poems

On Toys

What is
Ludokinetic
Poetry?

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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