Nine Arches Press

like starlings falling

Dillon Jaxx

Available to pre-order, this book will be dispatched close to publication date, 02/07/26

ISBN: 9781916760400

eISBN: 9781916760417

Price: £11.99

Publication date: 2nd July 2026

Format: Paperback / eBook

Territories: World

Extent: 72pp

DCF: Poetry Collections

Cover artwork by Georgia Robinson https://georgiarobinsonart.com/

The debut poetry collection by Dillon Jaxx, like starlings falling, is a mixtape from an eighties childhood that moves between requiems for a dead brother, anthems for the queer self, and love songs for a body sabotaging itself and its keeper through chronic illness.

In Jaxx's bold and precise poems of absence and discovery, surreal and sometimes grotesque family portraits are painted through the changing weather of time, with humour, irony, and love.

Praise for like starlings falling

‘I have been waiting for this book for such a long time! A sharp, searing collection that turns grief into something tactile and unforgettable; carrying loss in the body, objects, and in language. Unflinching yet deeply tender, these poems refuse easy consolation, insisting instead on witness, and on the strange, enduring weight of love.’ - Rachel Long

‘like starlings falling is a book of linguistic and formal innovation and tremendous emotional impact. This is a distinctive, fully-formed voice: I'm blown away by the distance the poems can travel in a single sentence, the number of jaw-dropping lyric phrases which lodge in the reader's mind. More than anything, in its depiction of family history and family loss, this is a book which really punches. I often think that loss is poetry's true subject: we write to restore and preserve, to say properly here what we can't elsewhere. These poems craft a language which can hold each aspect of grief - the bodily, the sacred, the everyday, the enormous - and the result is a searingly important and completely unforgettable collection.’ - Jonathan Edwards

‘Dillon Jaxx's visceral poems inhabit a realm where it is 'a quarter past normal'. A spectacular array of fractured lines and darkly swerving prose poems moves us from hospital wings to Jupiter's cloud halo to a family who 'eat our own tongues'. Layered, poignant, unforgettable.’ - John McCullough

'In like starlings falling bodies and blood, ties and knots, eternity and time, the sacrality of familiar and familial form ritually disappear to be felt – not seen – as connective tissue. Exercised and tight, pained and changing, these poems flesh loss and love in lingering language. ‘nobody i knew was doing anything extraordinary that day / except of course somewhere someone was because somebody always is’ – today that somebody is Dillon Jaxx.' - Kimberly Campanello