“He seems to start writing a poem and then becomes shocked, stunned, by a word he's just put down, unable to go past it, as if discovering the letters for the first time, as if the poem has somehow written him.” Kirsten Krauth, The Australian
Jam Sticky Vision is the successor to Luke Beesley’s highly-regarded third book of poetry, New Works on Paper, published by Giramondo in 2013. The poems in this collection blend observation, memory and anecdote – with particular interest in American film, rock music, visual arts and poetry, and the way they inhabit the poet’s everyday life in contemporary Melbourne. They create ‘an uncanny universe’, which hovers somewhere between the real world and that of the poet’s imagination, characterised by surprising encounters and fleeting details rendered with the utmost clarity, full of intimate disclosures and yet somehow public in its openness, where everything is animated by liveliness – objects, sensations, colours, even words as they appear on the page. As one critic has noted, “Beesley’s books make for very healthy reading. Lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, the menu not overly processed – no greasy late-night noir.” As another has written, “his windows open out to an ‘other’ view, wholly within our grasp but difficult to articulate”.
