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Sandy Jeffs

Sandy Jeffswas born in Ballarat in 1953. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1976, a time when recovery was seen as unlikely. She was in and out of institutional care for 15 years, including at the infamous Larundel Psychiatric Hospital.

Sandy was among the first to start speaking publicly about living with a mental illness, and much of her writing - including eight volumes of poetry - has been about her struggle to live a full life. She is well-known as a community educator, speaking to doctors and psychiatrists, at community health centres, and educational institutions.She has been honoured in the Victorian Honour Roll of Women, Her Place Women’s Museum, and with an OAM in 2020.

Flying with Paper Wings offers insights into madness – medical, social, personal – as well as disturbing reflections on its causes and its care. It is also a story of how poetry can become a personal saviour in the face of nearly irresistible forces. This edition is an updated edition based on the original text.

Read this exceptional book. It takes you beyond your own narrow terror towards something that might be called insight.
—Helen Elliott, The Age

Awards:

Highly Commended Certificate in the Human Rights Commission’s Non-Fiction Award 2010
SANE Book of the Year 2010
Shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year Award, 2010

MARCH 2024 | 9781925950946 | Paperback | 152 x 229mm | 278 pages

For more paperback copies, please visit IPG Book in the US or Gazelle Book Services in the UK

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Sandy Jeffs

The 2020-2021 Covid-19 Pandemic

What was it like to live in Melbourne during the 2020-2021 lockdowns? Capturing the day-to-day struggles of lockdown, the daily news, Dan Andrews’ 11am morning press conferences, the tensions between Victorians and the rest of Australia, Trump’s chaotic America, the conspiracy theories that circulated and battling her own mental health, Sandy Jeffs takes us through the whirlwind of events in imaginative haiku poems. These became her sanity while the world spiralled into madness.

First wave fear is back.
Before an end was in sight
now there is no end.

Trying to make sense
of an unravelling world
that is downright mad.

This is not only a book about the pandemic but also about political wins and political failures. From Dan Andrews to Donald Trump. Each day brings news that creates despair or joy: the pandemic numbers and the voting numbers side by side. And as the world is in the grip of COVID madness, sanity is found in poetry.

NOVEMBER 2021 | ISBN 9781925950366 | Paperback | 191 x 235 mm | 300 pp

Sandy Jeffs

but I am madness

and madness is me

it holds you captive

like a hapless bunny

caught in the headlights.

In this moving collection of poems, award-winning writer Sandy Jeffs shares her journey through madness over four decades, drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and the motley gathering of characters at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Both delightful and insightful, playful and serious, witty and whimsical,The Mad Poet’s Tea Party provides a devastating commentary on how our society treats those with mental illness from the perspective of someone who has experienced all its interventions. It captures in poetic form the enigmas and contradiction in madness.

2015 | ISBN 9781742199498 | Paperback | 210 x 148 mm | 82 pages

Sandy Jeffs

Not since Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton has anyone written so candidly about madness. Sandy Jeffs' poetry has a stark dignity, capable of conveying "shudders of intense fear". Yet in the midst of her rigours, she can access a voice both wild and funny. Sandy Jeffs' leavening sense of humour peoples her darkness with the sirens of the supermarket, a tinsel paradise and high-tech technicolour Armageddon. After all, God is only a word and angels, although mad, sing the wanderer into paradise.

2004 | ISBN 9781876756512 | Paperback | 200 x 132 mm | 120 pages

Sandy Jeffs

Poems from the Madhouse invites readers into the paradoxical world of insanity: the confusion and clarity, the courage and fear, the bleak despair and the black comedy. Only a poet could make us hear the thundering whisper of insanity, the endless circling of the revolving door, the sheer practicality of whatever gets you through the night. Here are portraits of other people in wards filled with restless wanderers. In the end, it is humour, a thesaurus of monickers that enable the reader to emerge sadder, wiser, but not hopeless.

2002 | ISBN 9781876756345 | Paperback | 180 x 140 mm | 88 pages

Sandy Jeffs

Sometimes memory warps cobbling together a host of images leaving the self embellished by the past.

The poems in this collection are an evocative documentation of the harrowing experiences of a child living in a hostile and unhappy home. The reader is shown the pain, the bitterness and the mixed emotions that accompany the experiences of growing up in a family torn apart by domestic violence and alcoholism.

Memory is tested by remembering what one does not want to remember. Bearing witness was unbearable.

2000 | ISBN 9781875559985 | Paperback | 200 x 130 mm | 108 pp

Deborah Staines

Sandy Jeffs

An award-winning joint volume of poetry, Sandy Jeffs invites the readers into the world of schizophrenia in Poems from the Madhouse, while Deborah Staines presents vivid images that evoke the mythic past and the technological future in Now Millennium. Staines' sequence, Venus Port, explores the destruction of the social fabric set alongside poems of love and loss, images of video worlds as well as words that catch moments on the cusp of millennium. Poems from the Madhouse invites readers into the paradoxical world of insanity: the confusion and clarity, the courage and fear, the bleak despair and the black comedy. You will emerge sadder, wiser, but also exultant in the spirit she shares with us.

1993 | ISBN 9781875559206 | Paperback | 180 x 140 mm | 124 pages