Lincoln Jaques, Aotearoa New Zealand

I hold an MA and a Master of Creative Writing. My poetry and fiction has been published in New Zealand, the US and Ireland, most recently in a fine line (NZ Poetry Society), Mayhem, Fast Fibres, The Blue Nib, Fresh Ink 2, Flash Frontiers and the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook (Massey University Press). I was a finalist and ‘Highly Commended’ in the 2018 NZ Emerging Poets. I live in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland.

My project is a sequence of poems exploring senses of identity through themes of dis-attachment, love, loss, death, isolation, violence and the effects of war leading to the disconnection of ourselves from our spiritual selves, all set within urban landscapes around the globe to which I have travelled. I wish to approach each city from a unique point of view – not as a tourist trying to write a tourist guide, but as an observer peeling away the top layers and looking deeper into the social, cultural and spiritual fluidity of a place.

My influences are the sharp descriptive passages of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities; the minimalist style of Alessandro Baricco; the acute observation of life and nature from Mary Oliver, Zbigniew Herbert and Raymond Carver; and the religious reflectional writings of Julian of Norwich and the early Desert Fathers and Mothers.