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