How To Make A Basket by Jazz Money
David Unaipon Award-winning collection, How To Make A Basket by Jazz Money
‘A luminous and beautifully sculpted, seamless collection of poems that reflects on place and passion’. 2020 David Unaipon Award Judges. A$24.99
‘I adore this book’ just as much as Tony Birch does.
‘Satirical, sensitive and subversive, Jazz Money is a poet to watch.’ Omar Sakr.
Indeed she is! Jazz Money blew me away when I caught her spoken word performance If Write A Poem on NITV earlier this year. Her delicate words weave a basket – not only for her but for us.
How To Make A Basket is Money’s first book – a collection of poems that compels you to surrender. Be present and feel the suppressed emotions; perhaps you were too scared, too weak to acknowledge. Jazz is kind, raw and generous – when she offers her basket for you to carry what you’ve unearthed so it can sit safely above the surface.
I caught myself re-reading – retracing each line to find where I began and where I was going. Jazz’s poetry reminds me love still exists even if my heart is fragmented. She traverses the political landmines (living Blak) and reclaims language so that we know the taste of revival when it is spoken.
How To Make A Basket is a series of love letters, a declaration, you are – we are, still here.
You can purchase How To Make A Basket from UQP.
Jazz Money is a poet and artist of Wiradjuri heritage, currently based on sovereign Gadigal land. Her poetry has been published widely and reimagined as murals, installations, digital interventions and film. Jazz’s poetry has been recognised with the David Unaipon Award, the Aunty Kerry Reed-Gilbert Poetry Prize, the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize, a Copyright Agency First Nations Fellowship and a First Nations Emerging Career Award from the Australia Council for the Arts. How To Make A Basket is her first book.
Feature image credit: Hannah Leser.
