Wild Curious Air

There were also exceptional bright days
almost as if weather could no longer alarm us.
It was not the time to hate everything.
But not quite the time to dance.

Wild Curious Air is a conversation, a series of readings or observances, full of shiftings: of ideas, words and bodies; through breath and breathlessness; intimacies and desires; ecstatic and dreaming states; and continuous retrievals of memory. It is a book of play and pleasure that acknowledges the global emergencies of the 21st century, as a calling to and a calling up of things, big and small, close and distant, made in language, made while moving among and through the world.

Attentive and in the world, Jones’s language twists and turns ardently from light to dark as she plays hazard with lyric’s opening up of time, space and the body.
Angela Gardner

Wild Curious Air is a distillation of decades of reading, thinking and writing. The poems interrogate, deconstruct and reassemble an incredibly wide range of cultural material, from classical Greek and Biblical sources to various Modernist literary touchstones via Barthes, Irigaray, Mary Shelley and other speculative fiction classics, Alice Through The Looking Glass, Derek Jarman and The Pet Shop Boys. It is a book of journeys, both symbolic and ecologically grounded.  At the same time the reader is acutely aware of the numinous: the landscapes and objects in these poems are humming with secret potential, hidden loss, un-articulated warnings. In the words of the title poem, ‘I walk through the curious air. /I feel earth thrust and scrape.
Melinda Smith

Whether ‘moon time‘ or ‘bee time‘, there’s no predicting what you’ll encounter on this lyrical stroll with Jill Jones through the wild curious air. Her scrupulous eye and keen ear uncover surprise after fresh surprise—you couldn’t ask for a more compelling guide.
Benjamin Dod

‘The vital contemporary poems of Wild Curious Air have a circular quality – image linkages and runnels – yet each rereading feels new.’

Luke Beesley, Australian Book Review