The debut poetry collection by Dillon Jaxx, like starlings falling, is a mixtape from an eighties childhood that moves between requiems for a dead brother, anthems for the queer self, and love songs for a body sabotaging itself and its keeper through chronic illness.

In Jaxx's bold and precise poems of absence and discovery, surreal and sometimes grotesque family portraits are painted through the changing weather of time, with humour, irony, and love. Unsettling and tender, this forensic poetry knows how the traces of bereavement and dislocation cling to us like evidence, and the way languages and precious memory stitches things together. And ultimately, how we find belonging and selfhood, keeping the 'holy days' of childhood self-discovery alive within us.

Poetry Book of the Month, The Observer, July 2026

Jerwood Prize for Best First Collection longlist