Abigail Parry spent seven years as a toymaker before completing her doctoral thesis on wordplay. Her poems have been set to music, translated into Spanish and Japanese, broadcast on BBC and RTÉ Radio, and widely published in journals and anthologies. She has won a number of prizes and awards for her work, including the Ballymaloe Prize, the Troubadour Prize, and an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, Jinx, published by Bloodaxe in 2018, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018.

Books by Abigail Parry:

Other poems on the web by Abigail Parry:
"The Quilt"
Two poems
"Instructions for Not Becoming a Werewolf"

Abigail Parry on Twitter.

About Jinx:

"These are outstanding poems: constructed like a collection of beautifully made, trick, locked boxes, they are innovative, complex, and lush in their language and texture. In an explosion of gaming we find in the poems etymological digging, rare words, number games, anagrams, hidden shapes — as well as a range of experiments in traditional and contemporary form. This is poetry con brio, ambitious, far-reaching, but using disguise to tell hidden stories of emotion and pain."
— Jo Shapcott

"Abigail Parry brings a trickster's delight in instability, not just to the old themes of innocence and experience, but to the shadowed and less commonly charted regions that lie between. Her poems move, and change, rapidly and headily, with a musical springiness that never flags and is all her own. Jinx is an abundant, exuberant, unsolemnly wise, and wholly beguiling first book that marks Parry out as the pace-setter of her generation."
—Christopher Reid

"Abigail Parry's scintillating and disturbing poems are presented as games — games of extraordinary linguistic richness and imagination, whose rules are unclear but engrossing. The poems work with pairings and confrontations as games do: man/woman, people/spooks, in love/out of love, life/death. The creatures and ideas that people these poems of wit and wonders are both worldly objects and magical tokens. Often they have a haunting beauty, like the delicate, short Japanese series on moths. At the end, the book throws the cards in the air, like Alice: You're nothing — nothing but a pack of cards. But this book is a great deal more than that, echoing in '52 Card Pickup' Ovid's claim for play in Remedia Amoris. In my view this vivid metaphysical collection is the most exciting and interesting poetic debut for years."
—Bernard O'Donoghue