Jan Dean is a Hunter Region poet. She won the 2018 Newcastle Writers Festival joanne burns Microlit Award for her prose poem ‘Fish Flops and Flaps’ published in Shuffle by Spineless Wonders. She was awarded the Seniors’ Prize sponsored by Baytree by Ardency at the 2019 Lane Cove Literary Awards with ‘Moss Poem’. Her work has been published in Not Very Quiet (online), Southerly, Meanjin, Rabbit Poetry Journal, the Australian, Eucalypt: a tanka journal, and Newcastle Poetry Prize anthologies. She holds a Distinguished Service Award from FAW NSW. Her With One Brush (IP, Queensland) was short-listed for the Mary Gilmore Award and her pocketbook Paint Peels, Graffiti Sings, (Flying Island Books, Macau) is in English and Mandarin.
Flying Islands Pocket Poet Publications
Paint Peels, Graffiti Sings
In National Library of Australia
trans Ruby Chen, Karen Kun
The title of Jan Dean’s 2014 collection in the ‘Pocket Poets’ series published by Flying Island Books (a joint project of the Association of Stories in Macao and Cerberus Press in Australia) is taken from a line in a short poem called ‘Wonder’ (p.74), near the middle of the collection: “Why do people lament decay / and crave constant renewal? / While paint peels graffiti sings / the wonders of evanescence.” These lines capture the spirit of this collection by a poet with an artist’s eye who always seems to have both eyes open to the wonders of evanescence.
Review: Reviewed by Steven Schroeder, Chicago
Read more of the review: vacpoetry.org/journal/paint-peels-graffiti-sings