Liesl Jobson's poetry and prose has appeared in numerous South African and international journals including Chimurenga , New Coin , New Contrast , The Southern Review , Mississippi Review , Sleeping Fish , The Rambler and anthologies: Open (Oshun, 2008), Letters to the World (Red Hen Press, 2007), White Ink , (Demeter Press, 2007) and Touch (Struik, 2009).

Jobson won the 2005 POWA Women's Writing Poetry Competition, and her collection of prose poems and flash fiction, 100 Papers (Botsotso, 2008) received the 2006 Ernst van Heerden Creative Writing Award from the University of the Witwatersrand, where she graduated from the MA Creative Writing programme with distinction.

In 2007, she was awarded a Community Publishing Project grant from the National Library of South Africa for her poetry manuscript, View from an Escalator (Botsotso, 2009). Jobson works as a journalist for the South African daily literary website, BOOK SA, and edits the South African domain of Poetry International. She plays bassoon and contrabassoon when there is nobody else to do so.

She comments: “A poem usually nudges me on waking, arriving as a vague bodily experience, some roiling in my gut, a discontented neck, or yearning

in my wrists. The drama of dailiness starts this visceral encounter and a clutter of words fills a page. On lucky days a poem emerges. Then my limbs quieten and I exhale. I write in order to sleep. I write to sleep in order…Poetry is a vagrant art. It thinks it wants reverent placement, but it has an irrelevant heart. Revenant, irreverent. Poetry is a shifty joker, slipping in uninvited and snaffling the freebies. Poetry takes care of itself.”

"Jobson's 100 Papers is a visceral and voyeuristic anthology of ordinary moments exposed, laid bare and magnified into engrossing prose poems and microfiction—deeply South African flashes of life, seconds of inspired clarity breaking through the commonplace... all created from finely considered observations, the hundred papers contain a seed of quiet optimism."

- New Contrast

Poetry is a vagrant art. It thinks it wants reverent placement, but it has an irrelevant heart. Revenant,
irreverent. Poetry is a shifty joker, slipping in uninvited and snaffl ing the freebies. Poetry takes care of itself.”

Visit: www.liesljobson.book.co.za

House Sitter

Like Leonard Cohen and the good Tupperware,
the blue ceramic bowl and the cow hide couch,
my nephew got lost in the divorce.

His marks weren't as good as his folks had hoped.
But, like my ex and his sister,
the boy is devout, serious, honest as salt.

He'll look after my parrot, put chemicals in the pool.
There'll be no cigarette burns in the blankets
nor party animals getting tractor-faced in my lounge.

At his boldest
he might serve his Bible study pals
frosted cupcakes for fellowship.

I remembered him as a curious child,
probing every answer; and hoped, by some miracle,
he'd found a way to eclipse his pedantic family.

I wished I did not feel compelled
to lock away those sparkling things
that bring the sacred home:

my I Ching and tarot cards,
the lesbian erotica
and stash of holy grass.