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“Voraciously experimental, precociously accomplished.” Poetry International

“Multifaceted, mega-fabricated, louche architecture.” Magma

Jon is a Derbyshire-born writer, editor and researcher who specialises in amalgams: hybrids, mixtures, collections and crossovers, of poem and game, fantasy and realism, curation and composition. He writes micro-texts that often take the form of character portraits, nature lyrics or puzzles, and combines them with the work of other writers and artists in genre-blurring anthology books.

Poetry London have called him a “poet of fantastic inversions”, but such inversions are just one way of rethinking the poem as an object of readerly play and investigation. His work has been published in The Sunday Times and performed on BBC Radio 4, as well as appearing in a number of British and international journals. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2012 and the Poetry London prize in 2014 and 2016.

He has also published academic papers in the field of game studies. A monograph, Dual Wield: The Interplay of Poetry and Videogames, was published in 2022.

For a fuller account of his approach to writing, with examples, check out the short essay 'The Amalgamist&rsqo;s Workshop'.

Get in touch: jonskeletone [at] gmail.com. Or subscribe to Stray Bulletin for irregular updates.

Super Treasure Arcade
(Sidekick Books, 2013) • Currently unavailable

A micro-poem for one computer game from every year from 1971 to 2013. The first Treasure Arcade was compiled as an e-pamphlet for National Poetry Day 2011, almost exactly 40 years after Galaxy Game, the earliest known coin-operated video game, was installed at Stanford University in California. An updated edition, Super Treasure Arcade, with two new poems and redesigned colour pages, was printed two years later as a backers’ reward for the crowd-funded Coin Opera 2: Fulminare’s Revenge anthology.

related: Ludokinetic Literature.

Extracts

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More projects

Poems
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The
Amalgamist’s
Workshop
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What is
Ludokinetic
Poetry?
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Sandsnarl
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Unravelanche
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School
of Forgery
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Dual Wield
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The Hipflask
Series
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Whispering
Leaves
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Adversary
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Headbooks
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Scarecrows
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Hybardrids
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Tomboys
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Birdbooks
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Super Treasure
Arcade
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Death Daydream
Season
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Sidekick Books
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Core Samples
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Riotous
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Superminis
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The
Mechamorphoses
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site by jon