Recipes for the Disaster won the Anne Elder award for best first book of poetry published in 2019 - here is what the judges said:

Gareth Sion Jenkins’s ‘Recipes for the Disaster’ is a destabilising travelogue of love, friendship, and adventure that evokes an irresolvable tension between familiarity and strangeness: “Voices unbroken by fences, dismantled by distance”. Jenkins’s language, ranging from laconic humour to intoxicating description, continually unsettles interpretation. Characters ignite against each other in an interdependence that forms recurring connections and epiphany, particularly through some hallucinatory near-death experiences haunted by the unreliability of memory. Along with vivid incantatory sequences describing these charged inner and outer landscapes, Jenkins observes the globalised homogeneity of the modern city.

Judges comments—Anne Elder Award: Gig Ryan, Marcella Polain and Rae White

Recipes for the Disaster was also Highly Commended in the 2019 Mary Gilmore Award.

Book Reviews:

Joel Ephraims in Plumwood Mountain:

Full review Here: “Whitmanesque in its force, physiology and multi-dimensional inclusivity; cinematic in its visceral and dramatic imagery and tone.”

Michael Aiken in Backstory Journal:

Full Review here: “Recipes for the Disaster is intense, monolithic, and casually personable. A treasure to delve into again and again.”