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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.

Sidekick Books
Website: www.sidekickbooks.com • Ongoing from 2009

Sidekick Books is a small press publisher started by Jon with Kirsten Irving to explore, publish and promote experimental, collaborative, multi-disciplinary projects. They publish exclusively multi-authored books, ranging from team-ups between poets and visual artists to compendiums featuring dozens of writers. Publications have mixed poetry with comics, critical essays, and astrophysics, and the major subjects of interest include ecology and technology. Their latest series, Headbooks, builds interactivity, visual and informational poetry into their oeuvre. One of the overall focus points of the press is to pioneer a major alternative mode of presentation for print poetry, outside of the single author collection and the retrospective anthology – one that is not so zero sum, and relies less on the celebrity and prestige of authors for its appeal.

related: Super Treasure Arcade and Core Samples are both limited edition Sidekick Books projects.

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

site by jon