‘Virginia Jealous…unpacks the cliches by being ‘utterly present, out there on the edge of the world.’ In Hidden World, a beautifully bound chapbook by Hallowell Press, she is poet/diarist/freelancer/flaneur, not merely absorbing the Other but conversing with the Other; she inserts local news: two school girls mysteriously die, the vices of corrupt politicians. Her notebook entries are prose passages that trace back to all kinds of subliminal sources released by travel: her deceased father’s trip to ‘Bombay, Cannamore, Madras’, or a poem by Les Murray.’
Michelle Cahill, Westerly July 2013
Hidden World, by poet and travel writer Virginia Jealous, was the second in our wellwellwell… chapbook series. The edition is now sold out.
Emerging from her recent three-month Asialink writing residency in India, this collection of precise, evocative prose and poetry ranges from the Southern Ocean to the hill towns of the high Himalaya, exploring notions of home, history and belonging.
A few copies of Hidden World may still be available from Tea House Books in Denmark, or from Northside Books, Northbridge.
Virginia Jealous is a freelance travel writer and poet. She contributes regularly to publications including Lonely Planet and the Weekend Australian; her poetry appears in journals and online and she has performed at arts festivals in Australia and India. A selection of her poems, Things turned upside down, was released by Picaro Press in 2011. She lives out of suitcase and on the road when not at home in Denmark, Western Australia and takes a bird book and binoculars wherever she goes.
Hallowell Press 
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