print Publications

F- Words

My collection ‘F-words’ is published by Recent Work Press (May 2021).

‘F-words’ is less expletive, more reconnaissance flight. In this five-year exploratory survey of territory that might include poetry, Malins forays into fables, fauna and flora, family, feminism, faraway and further.

Order your copy from Recent Work Press.

Cavorting with Time

writing Online

Click through to read or listen to poems and other writings published online.

‘Hey Sexy!’ - Cicerone Journal, Issue 6: Variety, March 2023

“7 or 8 years old, still in infants’ school. Two pale skinny white boys, brothers, with matching blonde buzzcuts (a marker of poverty, not fashion, in 1978) shouted, ‘You’ve got sexy legs!’ in unison. We went to the same school, were around the same age. They lived up the street in a yellow fibro house with a low fence of horizontal planks, painted mission brown, or maybe white, past the twinned eucalyptus with a boulder clenched in its cloven trunk, but before the big vacant block where we jumped our bikes on the bush tracks.”

Enjoy my reflection on sexiness - how we form our ideas and attractions growing up, and how they change over time, published by Cicerone Journal.

Cavorting with Time is a series of poems about female ageing and mortality. They are presented in this volume as a work in progress, a script that will develop and mature over time, gathering notes and annotations with each new presentation. She has performed variations of it solo, with musical accompaniment, and now it performs on the page.

This book was created in collaboration with Ampersand Duck (Caren Florance) and includes line drawings by Jacqui Malins.

In this sequence of poems, Jacqui Malins negotiates and renegotiates her relationship with time and its effects on the body and mind. Time is a complex presence: variously a musician, a dance partner, a tattooist, an adversary to be gripped and wrestled, the turner of a cosmic crankhandle, a pair of cupped hands waiting to catch us at the end of consciousness, and more. Malins bears clear-eyed and nuanced witness to the ravages and caresses of our constant companion, ‘Time, our sister’ while gazing calmly at ‘Death, who walks with her.’ An experience you will not forget.
-Melinda Smith
Winner, 2014 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry

Click on the image to purchase Cavorting with Time from Recent Work Press ($12.95 AUD)

Their own words - 40 years of Canberra graffiti

Their Own Words - Forty Years of Canberra Graffiti is the first published book about Canberra's graffiti. It tells an image-rich story of this city's graff from writers' perspectives and captures some of the style, colour and energy of Canberra's scene from the 1980s until the present. Co-authored with researcher and designer Caren Florance, with images by project photographer Thomas Edmondson, additional photography by Jack Flash and contributions from Canberra graff writers JINKS, RUBEN, SETH, WISKE, STOCK, KIOSK, SHUTE, MGO, MEKS and SYTAK. Available from Tuggeranong Arts Centre.

Zines

Jacqui has produced a number of zines containing her poetry: Neonate (2015), Water and Stone (2016) and Words in Flight (2018).

Swipe

Swipe is a collaborative project by artist Caren Florance, in which she invited poets to respond to a zine she made. Jacqui was fortunate to be one of those poets:

Swipe is a project I started about halfway through my doctorate, when I was scanning some book pages and seeing the tips of my fingers appear in the output, pushing the pages down onto the glass. … I began pressing the scan button and moving my fingers along the glass in various ways, following the laser-light, reaching into it and away, gesturing and sliding. The result was organic and fleshy — the body in the machine — with striations of light and smooth green underwater colours. I made a zine from it, and invited poets and artists to connect with it textually.

Caren Florance, 2018

‘SPIRES’ for HIDDEN ROOKWOOD FILMS 2022

A chorus of the dead speaks to the birds moving above them through Rookwood Necropolis. From the grave, the dead contemplate life, death, body, and breath as avian life goes on around them. Birds embody an intense aliveness and presence, and a sense of the unfettered spirit. Like a spire reaches from the earth to touch the heavens, a linguistic thread of 'spires' runs through this work, connecting body and spirit through the animating breath.