Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Jinx
    Jinx
    Jinx
    Ebook114 pages47 minutes

    Jinx

    By Abigail Parry

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Jinx: a ruinous charm, a quickdraw curse, a knight’s move.

    Abigail Parry’s first collection is concerned with spells, and ersatz spells: with semblance and sleight-of-hand. It takes its formal cues from moth-camouflage and stage magic, from the mirror-maze and the masquerade, and from high-stakes games of poker.

    Jinx asks about the equivocal nature of artifice, and the mischief behind the trick. The poems deal in forms of influence: in seduction and persuasion, infatuation and obsession. They want to talk about what we submit to, and what we are compelled by.

    ‘These are outstanding poems: constructed like a collection of beautifully made, trick, locked boxes, they are innovative, complex, and lush in their language and texture. In an explosion of gaming we find etymological digging, rare words, number games, anagrams, hidden shapes – as well as a range of experiments in traditional and contemporary form. This is poetry con brio, ambitious, far-reaching, but using disguise to tell hidden stories of emotion and pain.’ – Jo Shapcott

    ‘Abigail Parry brings a trickster’s delight in instability, not just to the old themes of innocence and experience, but to the shadowed and less commonly charted regions that lie between. Her poems move, and change, rapidly and headily, with a musical springiness that never flags and is all her own. Jinx is an abundant, exuberant, unsolemnly wise, and wholly beguiling first book that marks Parry out as the pace-setter of her generation.’ – Christopher Reid

    ‘The creatures and ideas that people these poems of wit and wonders are both worldly objects and magical tokens. In my view this vivid metaphysical collection is the most exciting and interesting poetic debut for years.’ – Bernard O’Donoghue

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloodaxe Books
    Release dateMar 29, 2018
    ISBN9781780372358
    Jinx
    Author

    Abigail Parry

    Abigail Parry spent seven years as a toymaker before completing her doctoral thesis on wordplay. Her poems have been set to music, translated into Spanish and Japanese, broadcast on BBC and RTÉ Radio, and widely published in journals and anthologies. She has won a number of prizes and awards for her work, including the Ballymaloe Prize, the Troubadour Prize, and an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, Jinx, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018.

    Related to Jinx

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      For Snow Queens Who Have Considered Suicide Because Paul Newman in the First Twenty Minutes of Paris Blues Is Too Much

      Jun 14, 2022

      But I start with the great Sidney Poitier because his stardom was an established part of the Freedom movement in 1964, and he was to be the chaperone of my inner awakening that dramatic year. Indianapolis, my hometown, had some brave marches and two

      10 min read

    • Article

      Lauren Oyler And Patricia Lockwood On Their ‘Evil Twin’ Internet Novels

      Feb 8, 2021

      I hate it here. Everyone agrees that “here” sucks. We are miserable and unproductive and lonely all at once. Time goes fast but not in the way that it flies when you’re having fun, more like when you wake up after a nap to find that it’s suddenly dar

      7 min read

    • Article

      Lording

      Jun 14, 2022

      It’s 4:38 P.M., eight minutes after I usually go home, but now I’m rooting around under my chair cushion, double-checking my shirt pocket, hunting for an unmarked baggie of white bars, which I shouldn’t have left in my office, which I shouldn’t have

      17 min read

    • Article

      About Ed

      Jun 14, 2022

      I walk into the orchid show with Ed. As soon as I see the tumultuous hall I know he won’t last long. Ed walks like an old man though he is forty. After ten minutes on his feet, he vomits on some purple phalaenopsis. I get him outside through a fire e

      18 min read

    • Article

      Six Sonnets

      Jan 1, 2021

      Goldenrod, I could say, you know, everybody wants somethingfrom me, but, well, everybody wants something and nobody wantsnothing from me, goldenrod, towhead, beast. Goldenrod, you packthe meadows like gold-plated sardines. I have heart palpitationsbu

      3 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Max Porter

      Dec 6, 2019

      I would have been lost this year (as any other) without poetry to cling to and travel with. The post A Year in Reading: Max Porter appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Literary MagNet

      Apr 12, 2023

      U.S. Supreme Court decisions on policing, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, death certificates, physics textbooks, property labels on books. In their debut poetry collection, I Am the Most Dangerous Thing, published in May by Alice James Books, Cand

      3 min read

    • Article

      Reactions

      Aug 17, 2022

      Reactions
      2 min read

    • Article

      EDITOR’S Note

      Apr 12, 2023

      DURING THE FINAL WEEK OF EDITING FOR THIS ISSUE I, along with a few of my colleagues, attended the AWP Annual Conference & Book Fair in Seattle. It was the first time in four years I had been back to that yearly rite of literary communion and promoti

      1 min read

    • Article

      What We Are Carrying

      Oct 12, 2022

      WHEN I was ten I wanted to learn to play the clarinet and eventually join the school band. But (or And, or So—) my father found an affordable, used, kid-sized accordion, somehow found a tutor, and that, plus his moving the whole family to an air forc

      12 min read

    • Article

      José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature

      Nov 21, 2023

      American readers have largely forgotten the single greatest writer to come from the Latin American Boom: Chilean novelist José Donoso. The post José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2020

      She was a security guard and even though her uniform was black I could seeIt was covered in blood, the marble floor was covered in blood, it wasSlowly pooling out from the space where HER HAND used to beOh my god, I said, then I started to say, YOUR

      3 min read

    • Article

      Childlike Wonder, Adult Wisdom: Remembering Ursula K. Le Guin, Donald Hall, and Aretha Franklin

      Oct 10, 2018

      Never curse a slow elevator. Like a book or a song, it may offer lessons in grace or about growing older with truth and dignity. I was once on an aging contraption wheezing its way from floor one to two … to six, when the unobstructed honesty of a ch

      5 min read

    • Article

      Perfection

      Jun 9, 2020

      For years I could barely write a page. I thought I was becoming a virtuoso of smallness while the grief, which is wordless, occupied an ever-greater volume. My friend lived in the estates on the bad side of town. Let’s go to the forest, she said when

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Path Of Bliss

      Jun 6, 2022

      The Path Of Bliss
      1 min read

    • Article

      Devil Asks Why You Would Mouth The Word Pity

      Jul 1, 2022

      even in this abundance of dark? Even in this abundance of dark you have totake the stars on faith. Look: Under today’s dim sky there is a basket.In that basket there is a fish. Come night, you are the animal that will eat the best parts of it. And ye

      1 min read

    • Article

      Fourteen First and Last Sentence Novels

      Apr 22, 2022

      I think of this as a new literary form, a type of novelistic prose poem, a hybrid, a chimera, whose main currency is delight, wonder, and mystery. The post Fourteen First and Last Sentence Novels appeared first on The Millions.

      13 min read

    • Article

      Diaspora Sonnets

      Sep 1, 2022

      The old men drink their spritzers and gossipunder awnings. Red hued and blustery, like two roosters on the side of a road.Skyward they crane their necks and laugh, sometimes they wonder about kings and future kingsand how the muscles peer from their

      2 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Kevin Barry

      Dec 18, 2020

      Rattling around the house in the County Sligo hills, swinging from bouts of paranoia to moments of strange, demented hilarity, a 900-page doorstopper was just what I needed to stay grounded. The post A Year in Reading: Kevin Barry appeared first on T

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Books Briefing: The Best Books to Get Lost in This Summer

      Jul 9, 2021

      Memoirs and novels that satisfy the urge for high drama: Your weekly guide to the best in books

      3 min read

    • Article

      Sue Orr

      Nov 24, 2021

      Sue Orr
      1 min read

    • Article

      Interlude

      Mar 28, 2022

      Interlude
      10 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Jinx

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Jinx - Abigail Parry

      9cbook_preview_excerpt.htmlV͎D~:qJ2(A4H+eMOLI8b@v.\fb~ڛca/a8 N_]S(EQ:F:9Sh OzqζfCxo@ؚ҆(e?׻0n#\l{wtqDKA`iw=EQ8GLƎ.xYLx3Pϭl.LǬ]_dĔ0H6x úyCNZx EK)b|k#R8Aͭ2 Xj"Bsv9fxL(ψ qO \=|_NDJ&,]'4ЇP{!ᘨ+T&j=w0NpDZ ;m*Qp,9^TGBjGfrPjpFNmGJ=Vo>9$jnSK>64zk8A`%5xJ3Meք>M?:(ak' ' ljG^xKծ2.N6=#{m/( U=G-_ )tm+S?U3ʤau!}xϲT=Sզ4mC۩+"Soz-Wu`lOj.9h*p"]j#jPm V3v<tQg Sf([C ]VRAY׫T6^ԂZ0+t)9TֱTmZeھ+)W߽EՒ:IW T[>nձkp%(W3#_,dOPA0&KS!^|+#o]KJ NgAVΥao`A\I[XZ! 4sUEex`3Y#VϮN_mφ.apokxD]Ovx[εytE`*E|}.v݆ / n9.VFkD^͟|_
      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1