A fierce and unflinching poetry collection about the weight women are asked to carry, and what it might take to cast it off.
Moon Too Heavy is a collection of poems that move through myth, history, and lived experience to examine the weight women are asked to carry. With clarity, intensity, and lyric precision, Jac Jenkins’ poems hold darkness and beauty in the same hand, asking what it might mean to loosen that grip and let the weight fall away.
About the book
Moon Too Heavy draws on myth, history, and lived experience to explore the weight women have been asked to carry across time. The collection opens with a quote attributed to Pythagoras, who described women as aligned with chaos and darkness, in contrast to man’s supposed order and light. Jac’s poems examine how the lives of women continue to be influenced by the echoes of this premise.
These poems are fierce, layered, and unflinching. They move through stories of control, sacrifice, resistance, and reclamation, using voice, image and presence rather than argument to expose the lingering effects of these old ideas. Throughout the collection, humour, physicality, and lyric intensity coexist, creating space for recognition, release, and the possibility of another way of being.
Praise for Moon Too Heavy
This is poetry exploring the bounds … of the burden of societal expectations. Just as the moon has a waxing and waning, Jenkins’ book plays with dark and light through an astute balance of logic, research, and the imaginative chaos that creativity involves … [Jenkins uses] language to deal with emotional pain, cauterising the wounds, with the poetic process itself scarring the experience into a new shape.
Linda Collins[jac’s poems are] Tightly controlled floridity. Sex, sexiness, pregnancy, girlhood, motherhood – these are not so much ‘written about’ as they are played with – I can imagine Jac playing. Playing in her rural poetry lab. Using languages of mathematics & science & nature to experiment & play. Sam Duckor-Jones
Buy the book
About Moon Too Heavy
About the author
A poetry enthusiast from a young age, Jac finally committed to formal study and serious writing in her mid-forties, when she was a single parent and librarian (possibly the most stable of all her try-on-for-size occupations). Her writing achievements range from publication in journals such as Turbine | Kapohau, Room Magazine (Canada), The American Journal of Poetry and Landfall to winning the takahē 2013 Poetry Competition, to achieving a distinction grade in her MA in Creative Writing.
Pavlova Press 