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 Highly Commended in the 2019 Mary Gilmore Award

Gareth Sion Jenkins’s Recipes for the Disaster maps out various interlinked explorations of personal trauma, madness, doomed friendship and global breakdown through a series of incantations, dreamscapes, and restless narratives. The book is haunted by spectres of the self, as unstable and not always trustworthy, and of a world where human connection is also tenuous. It is a book whose structure is part of its meaning, using visual pointers and variations on narrative incidents, to explore a sense of haunting and questioning versions of the past and present, by turn ecstatic, mordant, and self-critical of its own privileged subjective position. Jenkins’ poetry fervently works a seam of darkness with vivid awareness, forensic obsession, and self-aware questioning and pushes boundaries with an intensity not always seen in Australian poetry.

Judges comments—Mary Gilmore Award: Dan Disney, Jill Jones and David McCooey

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.”