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the end of the world was marked with beautiful light

we should have known

Simmering with protest and boundless love, Jazz Money’s best-selling collection, how to make a basket, examines the tensions of living in the Australian colony today. By turns scathing, funny and lyrical, Money uses her poetry as an extension of protest against the violence of the colonial state, and as a celebration of Blak and queer love. Deeply personal and fiercely political, these poems attempt to remember, reimagine and re-voice history.

Writing in both Wiradjuri and English language, Money explores how places and bodies hold memories, and the ways our ancestors walk with us, speak through us and wait for us.

Winner of the 2020 David Unaipon Award

‘Within the pages of this crackling debut collection, Jazz Money guides us through the steps on how to make a basket, a learning seeped in a deep respect for country; her heart and veins, her soil and spirit. Poetry sings and calls to us on every page, within each line, sometimes quietly, but also with roaring energy. I adore this book, and will cherish having learned from Jazz Money that it takes true love to make a great poem.’
Tony Birch

‘how to make a basket is a lesson written on the body, navigating contours and flows on country, awakenings and flesh; a delicate constellation of strands reflecting rivers and stars, spilling moonglow and song on the pulse of time. This is a fierce and intimate offering storied through blood and secrets and salt and ash; an exquisite weave of pleasure and pain to carry heartbeats and truths, gifted to ancestors and her every horizon.’
Natalie Harkin

‘This is a brilliant debut that leaps, lights, and lives in tune with the depths of love. Satirical, sensitive, and subversive, Jazz Money is a poet to watch.’
Omar Sakr

‘Jazz Money rebirths the art of storytelling in how to make a basket: a fervent compass of language and time, echoing the lines of unceded memories.’
Yvette Holt

‘A luminous and beautifully sculpted, seamless collection of poems that reflects on place and passion. how to make a basket builds on the growing canon of work by contemporary Indigenous women poets, yet offers a new, fresh perspective on remembering and forgetting.’
2020 David Unaipon Award Judges