mark the dawn

Jazz Money is not just a talented poet, but also an incredible artist and filmmaker. This is their second collection of poetry and it has already received the Quentin Bryce Award. mark the dawn explores with breathtaking precision ideas of non-colonial time, Country, queerness, love and responsibility. At times passionate and gentle, at times ferocious and unwavering, this collection celebrates the incredible hard work that marginalised people undertake in finding and re‑finding a sense of being, but also the profound joy and wonder that can be cultivated in this reimagining. Reading these poems feels like a gift.

Money has an exquisite artistry with words. They create beauty and intensity through repetition which they showcase from their opening poem ‘so too the sunrise’. Here, they deploy a gorgeous use of alliteration to evoke beautiful imagery, as in the line “into glory glowing dawn”. Throughout the collection, they choose words which seem to come out of nowhere, and yet perfectly capture a moment in their poems.

Money’s shape poems are particularly mesmerising, unfurling like a starry river across the pages. ‘strike the sparks’ speaks to the theft of First Nations history, and what is left out when white hands curate another culture in museums and galleries. The structure of the poems reflect this; their margins playing with presence and absence, words seemingly missing at the edges. You could read the rhythm as clipped by the line breaks or as one long smooth sentence. Money’s poems are unflinching, speaking of erasure and of the wrongness that has settled over Country. They speak of the way settlers’ gazes rewrite the story of the landscape.

I found this collection profoundly moving. I felt this poetry like a hook in my own body, especially in its forceful refusal of colonisation and the re‑storying of this continent. Therefore, more than anything else I can try to say about it, I urge you to read Jazz Money’s glorious collection for yourself.