how to make a basket

by Jazz Money

the end of the world was marked with beautiful light

we should have known

Simmering with protest and boundless love, Jazz Money’s David Unaipon Award-winning collection, how to make a basket, examines the tensions of living in the Australian colony today. By turns scathing, funny and lyrical, Money uses her poetry as an extension of protest against the violence of the colonial state, and as a celebration of Blak and queer love. Deeply personal and fiercely political, these poems attempt to remember, reimagine and re-voice history.

Writing in both Wiradjuri and English language, Money explores how places and bodies hold memories, and the ways our ancestors walk with us, speak through us and wait for us.

Genres: Poetry, Australia, Queer, Nonfiction, Indigenous, LGBT

123 pages, Paperback

First published August 31, 2021

Reviews

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely book of poetry some resonated with me more than others, and some I will return to and get even more from them.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

"to dawn to dew to breath” (15).

Jazz Money’s poetry is something really special. Immediately you are welcomed into her writing, with smooth words and descriptions that evoke and embody Country. She is careful and precise, and consistent ease flows through her collection like a river.

“I can chart the moments
that made me love you

And float past the dark patches
That overwhelm our skies” (45).


You get not only a mix of fight, but poems of love throughout the collection. For her partner, but also for the land and identity. Her words are nourishing and hopeful, reminders of acknowledgement and the cycles of life that impact First Nations people, queer people, People of Colour and all those in between. I felt welcomed, I felt at ease.

"these hands are stirring
against a body stained with ink
memories of a family” (83).

Money also notes the current times, she writes of mask wearing and the future. Notes the impacts of time travel and how we could exist in a post-world. Her collection feels like a remedy for healing and opportunity in itself, a reminder to open one’s eyes.

There are a number of poems within this collection that spoke to me. Below are just some of my favourites. I cannot wait to see what Jazz Money writes next.

1. if I write a poem (23).
2. dripping banksia pods (34)
3. yirawulin (38)
4. a blue morning (52)
5. bila, a river cycle (59)
6. /unprecedented times/
2020 (71).
7. salvation of the new world (83).
8.oil afloat at birrarung marr (89).
9. I don’t sleep anymore (91).
10. prayer is electric (104).
11. how to make a basket (114).

[Jade Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 STARS
I reread this collection of poems today while off sick from work. I made sure to wander into the bush afterwards and really soak in all the words Money wrote.

Poetry has always felt somewhat inaccessible to me. This collection of poems works to decolonize the art-form and welcome all those that are willing to listen. I was moved to tears by some of these poems. The love for Country, queerness, using language and touching on experiences I scarcely understand- I’m grateful to be able to read this work again and again.

[Tashi Grey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Couldn’t put it down, an amazing debut of touching familiarity. Eager to see what Money writes next.

[Stef Rozitis]

I will reread this again and again and again and again.

[ValTheBookEater]

jazz money + poetry = the sublime

[Maggins McMurray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jazz Money's poetry is as cosmic as it is earthy. Her analysis of life in the colony as a First Nations person is powerful, and the connection to country that is woven through is full of love. I feel grateful to have been able to share in this beautiful collection.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

luminous, warm, inventive!

[Underground Writers]

This review was first published on the Underground Writers website: http://underground-writers.org/review...

Jazz Money’s debut book how to make a basket is a beautiful exploration of love, identity, history, and time through poetry and verse. Money is a poet and artist of Wiradjuri heritage who confidently explores her self-image in colonised Australian society. Every poem gives an intimate insight into Money’s identity: loving, strong, and Blak. how to make a basket is a celebration of love, queerness, strength, Indigenous Culture, Language, and tradition.

There is a tenderness in Money’s art that makes me feel like I am reading something very special and intimate. Poems like ‘redbellyblacksnake,’ ‘touchable,’ ‘heaven sent,’ and ‘the space between the paperbark,’ all speak of love, sex, and devotion and are incredibly emotive. I feel like I am reading Money’s diary or she’s read mine; she perfectly captures how it feels to love. The person to whom Money is often writing to is her “almost wife,” as Money so-lovingly pens, and every time she does write to, or about, her almost wife it is a beautiful celebration of their love for each other as a queer couple.

Another beautiful part of this collectionis the visual aesthetics combined with Money’s writing; the cover, the use of both Wiradjuri language and English, and how each poem looks on the page. I love a beautiful cover, something that UQP always delivers, and how to make a basket is no exception. The simplicity of the seed-like geometric shapes filled with the photographs of grain and coupled with the lower-case title are a flawless complement to the author’s clear and purposeful writing. I also love the seamless combination of different languages in a text, achieved here as Money’s poetry is written in both Wiradjuri Language and in English. Some poems are rotated on the page, some are in a rectangular ladder shape, others wind across the page like a pillar of smoke, and sometimes there are even stars printed on the page with numbers. Every turn of the page brings something new without a feeling of randomness or chaos.

A continuous tone throughout how to make a basket is the ongoing tensions and perseverance of First Nations people existing in colonial Australia. Money’s poems can be seen as an act of resistance—keeping Wiradjuri Language and memories alive in a society that clings to and celebrates its colonial past and present. With each collection like how to make a basket, First Nations peoples are celebrated and understanding and respect is being fostered in readers. how to make a basket is an exceptional debut and I cannot wait to read more of Money’s work in the future!

[Pip · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favourites:
gununga
gully song
"there are birds/ pinned to the sky/a great emu/ to guide us home"
"I see gunyas built this morning/ the old ways by hands relearning trees releasing new homes"
we rise
"the future is technicolour blak black brown/turns out we're all welcome here/queer brothers and sisters and non-binary siblings"
if I write a poem
"and if I write a word/it's to stop me from burning/within/it's to stop me from burning/ the city down/and baring my breasts/wailing with my chapsticks/a song that boils in my chest/in my soul/that no one has taught me the words to/yet"
"and if I don't write a poem/it's for the magnificence of lightning/of cicadas in chorus/rhythms too beautiful to capture"
"and if I don't write/don't think I have nothing to say/if I don't write/it's because this language/these letters/are not worthy"
false gods
yirawulin (sunset)
bila, a river cycle
"(all folk love rivers despite their erstwhile intentions/ following in their mazdas nikes adidas/they follow where bila moves"
through the moon
"there's so much cruelty/that a pandemic/swallows/ crowds out/the suffering of those in the light/forces many more further into the dark"
/unprecedented times/
a case study of the colony
keep in touch
"unlearning is a long journey home"
my hand is a bird
"smoke of the middens burning/to make the limestone to make the mortar/build fortresses/to hold the lies strong"
I don't sleep anymore
the transit of venus
apathy
how to make a basket
"this Country is not bad/but bad happens here/hear the smoke curl around the monuments/trying to reclaim sovereign stone
we burn leaves to cleanse a place/but this/I couldn't call this smoke/a healing medicine"
"how to make a basket
first you must begin/with the grasses/first you must tend the blades/ the sweet small shoots/first you must make healthy the soil/care for this place/tend with fire/carry the seeds/ first you must make the land right. first you must love your mother"

[ALPHAreader · Rating 5 out of 5]

it starts with smoke, it always starts with smoke ...

I was in the city the other day and knew I'd have time to burn, so I took Jazz Money's 2021 University of Queensland Press poetry collection with me, and went to the Fitzroy Gardens to read.

I am long-overdue in coming to the page here, though I bought the book when it first came out. But I am glad that I waited for the right time and feeling to be open to this remarkable collection - and it did indeed feel cathartic and prophetic to read it when I did, on a bright Melbourne day in the Fitzroy Gardens ...

And how accurate in a collection about "the tensions of living in the Australian colony today," that I did read it in those Gardens - near where Cooks' Cottage (a house where the parents of James Cook lived, brought from England in the 1930s) presides, in tribute to the coloniser. In the gardens where blue gums were removed to make way for sweeping lawns and ornamental flowerbeds (to look like some place other than here, it seems). Don't get me wrong, it's beautiful but - it's colony.

And just as Money's collection opens with smoke and the Djab Wurrung sacred birthing trees in Victoria (mother burred at the belly swollen as the great trees come to this place) which the Andrews government bulldozed to make way for a new highway in 2020, ... they - we - lost something, to the colony. To progress and control. Infrastructure and destruction. Money is exploring this constantly in beauty and horror throughout the collection, and it's an absolute powerful and masterful gut-punch.

Lilac sky swollen
lights. A slick black car on
slick black roads.

Stars don't shine in this town
only satellites
humankind's wandering wonders.

I'd rather wish on circuits
than lost black stars

Outstanding.

[Rose Wh · Rating 5 out of 5]

tbh i don't really know how to rate poetry so I'm just giving this a five.

jazz money has a distinctive, modern voice that comes through in contemporary language and themes of their poetry. the collection comments (often in protest) on specific events over the past few years - Djab Wurrung Embassy, the 2019-2020 fires, the 2020 NAIDOC theme, the pandemic, the Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement - as well as more general/personal themes - women she has loved, their relationship with their father.

their form is experimental and refuses to conform to the bounds and expectations of the oppressors' (my) language. they celebrate Blak and queer love, kinship and joy. also recommend their article Radical Joy on this.

"Poetry allows us to hold the pain of the colony and the joy of Blak existence simultaneously on the page. Indigenous female and queer poets make beautiful all the small and precious, make resonant the large and painful, all while continuing a legacy that has existed in this land always, and always will."

my favourites were - gully song, listen, we rise, if i write a poem, dripping banksia pods, stormgirl, echoes, unprecedented times, a case study of a colony, oil afloat at birrarung marr, i don't sleep anymore, digital native, prayer is electric, and the titular how to make a basket.

"/ how to make a basket /

first you must begin
with the grasses
first you must tend the blades
the sweet small shoots
first you must make healthy the soil
care for this place

tend with fire
carry the seeds
first you must make the land right
first you must love your mother

/ what you care for will care for you /

when you are ready
you will understand
how to make a basket"

[Productive Procrastinator]

This started at 3 stars but unfortunately slipped as I progressed with the collection. All I could think of when reading this is Alison Whittaker's brilliant collection of Blakwork (a work by another female Indigenous poet that uses an experimental style to explore the experience of colonialism Indigenous identity in a globalised and digital world, and Australian nationalism) and how two books can be extremely similar in style and theme but differ greatly in their success.

Jazz Money (easily one of the coolest names in poetry) admirably employs experimental structures/lineation to deepen the themes and visceral experiences of the poems here (something most modern poets neglect), but I felt that the focus on experimentation eventually worked against the book. I absolutely love the device of ambiguous stanza arrangements or the removal of most grammar marks to create a rhizomatic landscape of new associations for the viewer to wander (which also links in with the theme of a connection to land offering liberation to artificial structures of meaning), but sometimes it does just lead to unhelpful ambiguity. Rejecting or refusing to submit to a language's rules is always welcome, but it mustn't come at the cost of reducing accessibility, editing/tightening the language within the lines, or the communication of themes to a work (e.g. the absence of hyphens for compound adjectives here is just clunky, and one pome that attempts to strike a tranquil tone about love is hurt by the absence of commas). I understand the frustration for an Indigenous person to essentially have to write in a colonial tongue because it is the most commercially viable option, but this does sometimes drift into prioritising structure over the prosody of the line themselves.

Also, for all of the great experimentation, I found that the actual verse/content is consistently dry and rather cliché (one poem opens by describing a lover with the cliché of "hot and cold", seriously?). Once you get past the disruptive effects of the structures, the actual commentary on colonialism is rather obvious and superficial. This wouldn't be such an issue (poetry is about individual perspectives and how external events are translated by one's own body) if the collection succeeded in being viscerally effective. Money is of course writing from an authentic perspective, but a lot of the imagery remains so general and broad and uses symbols in such a traditional manner that much of it slid away from my memory as I read (or it comes off as strangely glib). On rare occasions, trite idioms or phrases are subverted, but the most part, they aren't, which lessens the sense of a specific viewpoint. For all the great specificity (like the motif of certain plants or mentions of unique Australian fauna), there's also a lot of unadventurous generalisation.

1.5/5

[Bert · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed the experimentation with form but, while the poet's perspective is authentic and valuable, the approach to the themes felt very generalised and surface level. In terms of the actual content of the poems, the discussion being had and the commentary being made, I felt there was very little here I hadn't seen done elsewhere in a way that I found more powerful. Too many times I felt like a piece of language or imagery I've seen before was used in a way that was not transformative and did not push or move the piece into new territory. I do not think this is bad poetry by any means, but I found it overly reliant on form and what I personally love to see is evocative use of the words themselves. The collection definitely has strong moments but overall I think this had potential it didn't quite fulfil.

Interested in seeing if the writer's second collection, published last year, drills down into something more personal or specific.

[Ali · Rating 5 out of 5]

I devoured this collection of poems, finding myself stopped in my tracks as I read the whole volume from beginning to end. Money both has a distinct voice and yet there is a real variety here - perhaps underpinned by a sincerity that become quite moving.
I have a particular fondness for rhythmic poetry, and some of the stand outs were yirawalin , listen and gunaga. Others made me want to copy them and stick them on the wall, like I did decades ago before i had 'proper art'. The arrangements are often provoking, providing multiple interpretations. One that stood out here was the recognisably lutrawitra To Fannie Smith, to whale breath. And I normally don't love love poetry, but there are just some reminiscent sweetly lustful entries here - a blue morning - that reminded me of the days I did. There are more political poems as well, their sharpness set off by the sweetness of others.

[Luz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tenía mis dudas sobre este poemario, especialmente porque Money es una mujer blanca. Sí, tiene herencia aborigen, pero sigue siendo una mujer blanca.

Escrito tanto en inglés como en lengua aborigen, este poemario también puede entenderse como un grito de protesta contra las brutalidades de la colonización y el borrón y cuenta nueva impuesto sobre las tradiciones aborígenes, aquellas que cuidaron y protegieron la tierra.

Money también explora temas personales: la familia, los viejos amores (Our Weak Constellations, un poema precioso y desolador sobre el desamor), el amor (Yirawulin, palabra aborigen que significa “atardecer”, mi poema favorito, una obra hermosa que combina todos los gestos tiernos y sublimes que nos ofrece tanto la naturaleza como el amor) y, por supuesto, los elementos que hacen de Australia una tierra tan rica (abundante, generosa, diversa, salvaje), pero al mismo tiempo tan pobre (envenenada, robada, colonizada). Es un canto a todos los elementos de una tierra que resiste.

Las cenizas (ash) y el fuego (fire) son los elementos principales de los poemas de Jazz, como catalizadores de un renacer y resistir de la tierra, haciendo alusión a la tradición aborigen de quemar los arbustos (agricultura del palo incendiario) para regenerar el suelo.

[Enya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection perfectly weaves together stories of history, spirit, love, family, race and so much more in stunning uses of language, form and concept. Not every single poem hit, yet such poems are ones that I can see hitting either someone else or myself at different times. And the poems that do hit just drown you in the emotion and complexity of their depths.

All this to say: this book left me breathless.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poetry in this collection comes in several different forms, some of which worked for me and some of which didn’t. I had difficulty with the poetry that used line breaks and left/right alignment differences - perhaps this difficulty was intended by the poet but it left me frustrated rather than keen to work out what I was missing. Poems I resonated with included ‘a cab, early morning, in the rain’, ‘oil afloat at birrarung marr’ and ‘that shore which is a cliff’. 3.5 stars

[Natasha (jouljet) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emotional, tender, political, gentle and nurturing. Of spirit, of country, of connection, and of family and the Aboriginal ancestors. With love, and truth, and the power of calling out.

Queer love, powerful intergenerational black love.

A collection that weaves Wiradjuri and English language throughout.

The title poem will be one I return to, again and again. Scathing, powerful and poignant.

[Georgina Bell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I connected with about half of the poems. And like a lot of great poetry, I feel it deserved and needs a second reading for me to soak in the beauty and story of this stunning collection.
I am moved by the weaving of grief trauma love culture country.
I am only learning, and will never really know - how to make a basket.

[Tash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning collection of poetry. Expressive moving, and innovative.

Thoroughly enjoyed seeing someone culture through the window of poetry with such an understanding of the craft.

There aren't words that capture the depth of this collection. It is felt, and I feel so humbled yet peaceful and filled with gratitude to engage in Money's format in this collection.

Absolutely stunning

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a gorgeous collection.

Fiercely forthright with the effects of colonisation, the longing for Country and the undertow of love. Jazz Money's words lull you into the stories she weaves around you like the smoke she writes about.

Fantastic.

[Frances · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clever & thoughtful !! 🌼

[Tina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poetry is all encompassing,

Encapturing
Enticing
Enhancing

Thoughts emotions ideas feeling

A few little words contain the universe.


Deep, heartfelt, moving.

[Bella Peardon · Rating 5 out of 5]

pocket of beautiful poems. Inspired me.

[BEA · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a big phatt crush on jazz money 🫶🏻

[Sophie]

the most perfect poetic debut. thank u year 10 english teacher.

[Jake Landa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful. A great way to return to poetry. Starts and finishes strong with plenty to ponder and enjoy throughout. Also Jazz Money is a sick name.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of these poems really resonated with me, others not so much but still really enjoyed reading

[Ronnie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love these poems so much. I’m a poetry dummy but Jazz Mooney’s writing is powerfully tender and alert to the living world.