Recipes for the Disaster

Winner of the 2019 Anne Elder AwardHighly Commended in the 2019 Mary Gilmore AwardGareth Sion Jenkins's 'Recipes for the Disaster' is a destabilising travelogue of love, friendship, and adventure that evokes an irresolvable tension between familiarity and strangeness: "Voices unbroken by fences, dismantled by distance". Jenkins's language, ranging from laconic humour to intoxicating description, continually unsettles interpretation. Characters ignite against each other in an...
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Winner of the 2019 Anne Elder AwardHighly Commended in the 2019 Mary Gilmore AwardGareth Sion Jenkins's 'Recipes for the Disaster' is a destabilising travelogue of love, friendship, and adventure that evokes an irresolvable tension between familiarity and strangeness: "Voices unbroken by fences, dismantled by distance". Jenkins's language, ranging from laconic humour to intoxicating description, continually unsettles interpretation. Characters ignite against each other in an interdependence that forms recurring connections and epiphany, particularly through some hallucinatory near-death experiences haunted by the unreliability of memory. Along with vivid incantatory sequences describing these charged inner and outer landscapes, Jenkins observes the globalised homogeneity of the modern city.Judges comments-Anne Elder Award: Gig Ryan, Marcella Polain and Rae WhiteGareth Jenkins's work reads like rituals or incantations, corrupted by the manufactured nature of our modern world while constantly seeking to resist that corruption. Historicity, environmental awareness, culture and its wars: these themes and their constant transmutation dominate and destabilise the voices in his poems. In between, the unreliability of language, an overarching self-awareness of privilege and the uncertainty of human relations make the book both alien and deeply personal. His is a project intent on an honest, heartfelt grandeur of connection, all the while haunted by the fear that such human connection is already doomed to a shallow etching of what it might be. Recipes for the Disaster is at once bleak, mystical and strangely life-affirming; an exploration of mysteries, an excavation of hidden failures, an exhortation to be better than we have been.Michael Aiken