Take a child’s fixation with what’s mine, mine, mine! Imagine a man’s obsession with similar flag planting magpie-ish sentiments, no thought spared for sentimental attachments (language, culture, land)
Studying Andrée’s Arctic balloon expedition you have to marvel at how badly dressed they were, how little they knew this landscape, its quick shifts, the realities of nature. The map oh-so-white. Didn’t factor in dense fog or heavy hoar frost, in their minds only sun—eternal, spotless
Drag ropes ripping The Eagle ascended, leaving them without steering power, still ignorant about fourteen kilometres of stitches perforating swathes of silk, letting out air, wheezing through patches of varnish. Atmospheric pressure squeezing life out of The Eagle’s inflated head
Would you be surprised it ended with a thud two days later? No witnesses (bar polar bears, seals, auks, puffins, terns— sorry, there are no penguins)
Now here’s another desk explorer with billionaires in his ears, world dominance starring his eyes, curated snippets filed as truth. A happy user of unnecessary force advanced weaponry AI and modern technology
Take this island at the epicentre of great-power competition— There’s hardly any population! Do they have music, culture, books? Do they even speak English? What about McDonalds? Well, we need this island very badly the small man who casts a shadow greater than himself said.
He thought it was green, must have thought it was green for go even though he’d always feared green flags.
He can’t see the stitching— how it’s come undone along the perforation, myriads of holes starring his own silhouette, leaking ego, leaking humanity, leaking, leaking
Mikaela Nyman
Mikaela Nyman’s first poetry collection in English, The Anatomy of Sand, was published in 2025 by Te Herenga Waka University Press. Her two collections in Swedish were nominated for the Nordic Council Literature Prize in 2020 and 2024. Her second collection To get out of a riptide, you must move sideways (Ellips, 2023) was awarded a major prize by the Swedish Literary Society in Finland in 2024. Born in the autonomous, demilitarised Åland Islands in Finland, she co-edited Sista, Stanap Strong! A Vanuatu Women’s Anthology (THWUP, 2021) with Rebecca Tobo Olul-Hossen. In 2024, she was gifted a memorable year in Dunedin as the Robert Burns Fellow.
Hungus, Amber Esau Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026
To celebrate Amber Esau’s terrific new collection, Hungus, Amber reads some poems and answers six questions. The conversation is like a surrogate review as I enthuse whole-heartedly on why and how I love the book so much.
a conversation
Paula: I love reading your collection so much. For all kinds of reasons. The rhythm of reading for a start. At times it’s like a lightning storm with my heart pumping, at times like that beauty moment when I stall and star gaze. Slow, fast, utterly inspiring. What was the rhythm of writing like for you?
Amber: A lot of the shorter poems and the foundations for the longer poems were written during my MA year but they really started crystallising once I had distance from the work. I had started editing it pretty soon after finishing my course but it was still very undercooked. I spent over a year not looking at the manuscript, reading and editing other poets’ works, before I could finally see mine better. The first draft of poems were a lot more slippery and while I love that uncertainty I was better able to accept where too much elusiveness was limiting my writing. The varying rhythms between the poems are likely in part due to these different concentrations of time. It’s also very Geminian of me to love a switch up like I do!! At my core, though, I am a turtle writer; slow on land, quick in the water.
Paula: Another love for me is your agility with words. Every line is sheer music delight, with sonic shifts and dances. Sweet sharp savoury. There’s hip jargon, urban slang, words that smash together or elide, words that jam in harmony, disharmony, similes that stick and surprise. I just want to hear you read the whole friggin book. Out loud. Honestly your use of words is inventive, life-rich, like a K-Rd dairy-on-the-corner milky hills mosh pit symphony. Do things sing differently as you move between page and performance?
Amber: Wooooah I really appreciate that, thank you. I never used to read my poems aloud until I finished writing them which often surprises people about my process. We all have our own internalised sense of rhythm and I have secretly always wanted to be a rapper. I think that kinda gets injected into the writing. If I say a poem aloud too early though, it starts trying to rhyme too much and I have to reset myself. This process creates a mean tension between the sounds of things and the meanings of them. I also grew up in a predominantly Samoan speaking household but I only spoke English. I understand Samoan better than I speak it and I think there’s something in there about learning a language only through the ears in relation to learning a language through the verbal and written word. The former is more mutable. Sometimes, I still have to say Samoan words aloud to know what I’m reading on the page and tbh, “fobbing” up my English is where I feel most at home. I think this might be a common experience within a lot of immigrant households.
Paula: The title, ‘Hungus’, magnetised me, with its connotations of both enormousness and hunger. And The Mantis, the equally mesmerising prankster figure on the cover who appears larger than life in poems, electrifies your writing ink. Did your relationship with The Mantis change over the course of writing the collection?
Amber: The Mantis is comical and menacing and laced in a sort of cartoonish violence that feels so familiar to me. I used to view it steeped only in its “badness” which was both alluring and repellent. Originally, the Mantis was very archetypal in my imagining and slowly I started wondering what the flipside to this figure would be… kinda in the way that Hinetītama becomes Hine-nui-te-pō. That’s where the Manaia comes out of. We all hold many contradictions and there are many factors that transform us – for better or worse, eh. Mostly though, I started to consider the Mantis’ capacity for change and how bloody annoying that is and how maybe that means it’s still possible.
Paula: Your collection has tendrils and roots in sky and land. It feels personal and it feels imagined. It feels political and it feels mythological. It feels like poetry of now and then and might be. Yep, as the blurb says ‘a work of world-building’. I love that. Was there an ignition point for the collection? Experiences, world, possibilities, real or imagined, that you wanted to ‘visit’ as you wrote.
Amber: Oh that’s mean as! Thank you! Originally, I planned to explore addiction/the addict in a way that echoes the different representations of Maui across the pacific. It wasn’t until the Mantis started bubbling to the surface that I had something to craft around. Warping Maui into the Mantis felt like an interesting entrance into the intersections of urban indigeneity and moana diaspora. It took a few versions of the work as a whole to realise that a big part of Hungus is about the idea of empire and ways we maintain certain legacies; of expanding so as not to be swallowed; of establishing hierarchies within a language; of projecting hurts as a form of self-preservation; of resisting meaningful change. In my experience, these also rhyme with the ways that power dynamics and inherited traumas are expressed within the home.
Paula: For me writing is a secret private intimate activity and also a public one, whether through Poetry Shelf poet connections or as a published author. Your moving acknowledgements page underlines how important other writers are to you, how important writing communities are. Do you need a secret private writing space alongside your nourishing community space/presence?
Amber:Definitely. I’ve gotten into a pretty consistent journaling practice which has helped me figure out what I’m actually saying, how I feel about my daily life, responses to current events, lots of dissecting my traumas lol, small notes for projects, and what I’m reading. Too many tokes back in the day means my memory is kinda shoddy though, so it’s been really useful writing about the books I read to help my recall.
Paula: In this upheaval world, a world that is straining and testing the foundations of humanity, what matters to you? As a writer yes, as a new voice yes, and as daughter, sister, friend, human being?
Amber: It’s hard not to be somewhat cynical about where humanity is heading, but publishing a poetry collection feels like an act of hope and faith. The other day, my brother, who doesn’t read poetry at all, texted me he’s been really enjoying the book, slowly reading through it, and cracking up that some poems have been sparking unexpected insights within him. It’s important to me that my brother, someone who has always felt a lil excluded from literary spaces, has found a place to dock in my poetry. This doesn’t mean that I’m anti-intellectualism – I’m just suss about the hierarchy of languages and knowledge systems lol. My idealistic ass still thinks that language fuckery is one of the many ways we might shift the collective psyche towards learning how to sit with uncertainty and make space for each other on our terms.
reading
Amber reads from Hungus
Amber Esau is a SāMāoRish (Ngāpuhi / Manase) writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. She is a poet, storyteller, and professional bots. Always vibing at a languid pace, her work has been published both in print and online. In 2023, she co-edited the queer poetry anthology Spoiled Fruit. She is a past recipient of the emerging Pasifika writer’s residency from the Michael King Writers Centre and the Ideas In Residence residency from the Basement Theatre. Hungus is her debut collection.
Blue gathers into estuaries and their sheen, tidal blue. At low tide: gull-prints, a soft pocking of absence. The flats spread, taking shape and losing it. From the dark of silted underplaces, cold blue, the diluted gleam, a film of tidal light.
Blue thins and wanders, a slow bleed along the faint line of return, littoral. Blue lowers, folds back, a weight without form, held under.
Mud receives it, works it loose: blue in grains, blue in residue. Blue gives way.
Tunmise Adebowale
Tunmise Adebowale is a Nigerian-born New Zealander. Her work has been published in Starling, Landfall, The Big Idea, Arts Makers Aotearoa, Mayhem Literary Journal, The Spinoff, Tarot Poetry Journal, takahē, The Pantograph Punch, Turbine | Kapohau, Newsroom, NZ Poetry Shelf, Verb Wellington, and ReDraft. She writes the Substack whispers of oizys.
The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.
A space to write quietly with a small group in the library BYO writing project or use the prompts provided Please note, this is not a workshop or feedback group – please talk to our friendly librarians if you are looking for one of those!
It never was bottomless, but then he never really believed it had been.
He often visits the pond in his dreams. But now it’s not there anymore.
Nod Ghosh from filthy sucre, Truth Serum Press, 2020
Nod Ghosh is a graduate of the Hagley Writers’ Institute in Ōtautahi, Christchurch. Nod’s books have been published in the U.K. and Australia. The most recent is How to Bake a Book Everytime Press (2025), a text-book on creative writing. See http://www.nodghosh.com for further details.
The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.
A new artwork is coming to Wellington Writers Walk – the Walk’s first sculpture in te reo Māori, and the first addition to the Walk since 2013.
Wellington Writers Walk has launched a Boosted campaign via The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi, with the aim of raising funds to cover the final stage of the new sculpture – installation in time for Matariki 2026.
The Boosted campaign will be open for donations until 6pm on Wednesday 20 May. Donation amounts are never shown online in Boosted campaigns, and you can choose whether or not to let Wellington Writers Walk know the amount you donate, and whether to donate anonymously. Even a modest donation will show your support by adding to our list of donors (and donors qualify for a tax credit or deduction, as Boosted is run by a charitable trust).
If you have any questions about the new sculpture, or about this Boosted campaign, please get in touch with Wellington Writers Walk.
the link for the campaign the link for the Writers Walk
We’re coming out from under dismal. The sun is up and so are the children, mucking about with skateboards. He’s out the back playing ‘Mrs Winter’s Jump’. And jump she does. She gathers up her rusty skirts and crosses all the crooked space between us.
Jenny Bornholdt from Mrs Winter’s Jump, Godwit, 2007
Jenny Bornholdt has published over a dozen books of poems, including The Rocky Shore (winner of the Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, 2009). Her latest collection is What to Wear (THWUP, 2026). She has edited a number of anthologies, including Short Poems of New Zealand (2018), and has worked on numerous book and art projects with artists including Annemarie Hope-Cross, Pip Culbert, Mary McFarlane, Noel McKenna, Mari Mahr, Brendan O’Brien and Gregory O’Brien. In 2018 she was the co-recipient, with Gregory O’Brien, of the Henderson Arts Trust Residency and spent 12 months in Alexandra, Central Otago. She was New Zealand’s poet laureate in 2005–2007, and in the 2014 New Year Honours she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services as a poet.
The Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: A place to enter and pause and take a long slow breath and then another, as you absorb the beauty movement joy stillness wonder movement of a poem.
I cross on the crossing with the red enamelled casserole dish vibrant, curved and handsome. As if I am a metaphor from the Bible I bring a gift to my father’s house enter via number pad and rise through the floors just my food, my keys, my phone, and me to where Dad props open his heavy door with his body. We kiss on the lips like Russians. His movements across the floor those of a clay figure, heavy and half-fired, due to pain in the third toe of one foot and the second toe of the other – another of the body’s unbroken codes. Threatening with gentle unconcern all my past beliefs he covers the plate of pasta with a tinfoil dish and places it in the microwave. Haiga Sofia, all its white-blue space the orange walls of Petra, those maharajah’s palaces with glass from Venice bearing witness to the Silk Road, he has seen the earth’s stone monuments and watched the progress of his plane across the rectangular world its continents like half-eaten biscuits littered on a dark blue plate. For dessert it’s cheese and the pears, dull brown and rounded, Taylor’s Gold, recommended by his mother years ago. I will give you a pot of dead hyacinths my father says – the last of the largesse.
Touche Éclat
A liquid concealer slash highlighter the woman as old as my mother dabbed into the dark blue indentations by the bridge of my nose
how intimate to be touched there to be seen, her old woman’s face covered in make up as my mother’s never is
her skin always with a sheen of oil, brown, though she did burn sheets of skin we would fight to pull carefully from her back.
Quoting Lear, had both eyes done at once You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drenched our steeples. Clear shields dotted with holes taped across her face
her face without its glasses small eyes and those dark circles as when the new moon rendered on the weather app, is shown in black.
We drove over unnamed hills covered in rocks like prehistoric animals. Between the different bays we hesitated parked, in the end, on a slope
It won’t be clear like your sea at home a woman had warned us, you won’t see your hand but still we swam – dotted yachts, someone rowing their boat ashore –
and dressed, subject to the sudden scrutiny of family groups, baby strapped to its father. In the car I retrieved my glasses which had skidded across the dash.
It was still winter when we swam at Cass Mum said and, as we drove past a wall of blossom like a waterfall white flowers are the best.
Kate Camp
Kate Camp is the author of many collections of poems, including The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls (winner of the 2011 NZ Post Book Award for Poetry) and How to Be Happy Though Human: New and Selected Poems (2020), and a collection of essays, You Probably Think This Song Is About You (2022). Her most recent poetry book is Makeshift Seasons (2025), a new collection of poetry. Kate was born in 1972 and lives in Wellington. Her latest book is the Leather & Chains: My 1986 Diary, a hilarious and heartbreaking journey through the rollercoaster entries of her teenage diary.
NZ Poetry Shelf 