Book launch!

My first full-length poetry collection is about to swim into the world.

"The Green Dress Whose Girl is Sleeping" (from Freight Books) is about love, loss and space travel, among other things. It includes beach-time haiku, interstellar concrete and terraced sonnets.

Everyone's welcome to the launch. We have poetry, booze and cake! What more could you want?!

Launch details...
15th October 2015, 7:30pm
Wash Bar, Edinburgh

You can join the Facebook events page here. 

If you can't make the event but would like a copy of the book, you can buy it here.


And a few words on the book, from two very fine poets:


'Russell Jones has been one of the most inventive and talented poets around for a few years now, but this first book displays the full range of his poetic gift and sweep of his vision. Few poets can combine, as he does, conceptual intelligence with emotional intimacy.

The poems are alternately witty, laugh-out-loud funny, tender, enriching, emboldening, mind-bending, devastating. From inside the Hadron Collider to outside the chip shop, he offers us shape-shifting collisions of life and poetry.  This is verse that meets our contemporary world, with all its multitudinous potential, fragility and loss, head-on. The reader is in for a thrilling ride. As one of the poems puts it: "Lie back, jack in. This dream is electric …"' Alan Gillis



'Russell Jones's collection moves from the micro to the macro and back with an alert alacrity that marks him out as a younger writer of real promise. This quality of attention demonstrates itself in both his language and his level of engagement: syllable meets chromosome, minute particular collides with particle, sonnet sequence essays a society. There is a Morganic faith in form, in information, and in format's capacity to frame the universe in a verse, evidenced by an abecedarian sequence of one word poems that recalls Hamilton Finlay at his wittiest. In all this, the deities are in the details, as it were, be they a telling snippet of recorded dialect, the 'origami feet' of a kingfisher, or the way a statue is painted darker by the rain. The tenderness with which they are recorded, the equal compassion for individuals caught in catastrophe or lost in introspection, makes this collection as impressive as it is engaging.' WN Herbert

Emma Press Anthology of Age

Emma's been busy. Very busy. Take a look at this pretty website, with its tufts of grass and hotheaded bulls and sloths having picnics. This website is pretty much like an afternoon inside my noggin, but online.

Anyway enough of that. Emma's brought out a new anthology of poems about age, edited by all-round ace, Sarah Hesketh. An important topic, as we all spiral towards it unwillingly. What has poetry to say on the matter? Well, you'll have to buy a copy to find out, won't you?! Otherwise, you're heading to your pension on autopilot, blind to the truth of your fragility on this mortal rollercoaster.

The anthology includes work from some very awesome poets including Aileen Ballantyne, Clare Best, Robert Hamberger, Holly Hopkins and many more (33, all told - that's your favourite number, isn't it?)

It also includes two poems by Russell Jones, some hairy rapscallion from Edinburgh. One is about dementia, and is a response to the picture pasted (by Edinburgh-based artist, Daniel Young) at the top of this blogpost. The other is about an old guy during Hurricane Bawbag (which translates, for the non-Scottish folk among you, as 'ball bag' - cute.)

So, if you know someone old, or someone who is getting old, I'd recommend checking this out. It could be a matter which makes the difference between life and death...! (PS: it probably won't be)

Russell Jones

Over the Line: Poetry Comics

You, yeh you there! YOU! You've done it now haven't you? You've really gone and done it. What a first class plonker you really are. You've totally gone Over the Line...

Feast your corneas on this beauty! An anthology of poetry comics, edited by the immovable Tom Humberstone and the unstoppable Chrissy Williams.

It's all about poetry comics (not to be confused with comic poetry - ho ho ho) and features work from some mighty fine artists and writers, including Bill Herbert, Amy Key, Chris McCabe, Anna Saunders and many more. Here's a little sample, suck it in!

The anthology also includes a comic of my sci-fi poem "Whatever Happened to the Blue Whale in 2302AD?" which is about folks living in a future ruined by our waste and pollution. It's illustrated by the super talented one-man comic cyborg Edward Ross who has done a top notch job with my meager morsels of words. Looky!

So, in brief, if you like comics or poetry, or both, buy this book. Buy it now. It's beautiful and sexy, much like your mum. Christmas is coming, you know what to do... BUY IT HERE

Russell Jones