Catherine Woulfe from The Spinoff invited six women to write a short piece celebrating Karlo Mila’s Goddess Muscle: Selina Tusitala Marsh, Leilani Tamu, Nadine Anne Hura, Kirsten Lacy, director of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Rebecca Sinclair, deputy pro-vice chancellor at the college of creative arts, Massey University and me. We each contributed a paragraph and a photograph.

I so loved this book. It is the kind of book that rises above your reading shelves and sticks, and was one of my top poetry reads of 2020. I was also privileged to hear Karlo read at my Wild Honey session at VERB. Such charisma on the page and in the air.

I got my daughter to take a photo of me with the book and before I could stop myself I lost in a poem, savouring the poetry richness, forgetting to smile for the camera, transported, uplifted a universe away from the lounge. If you haven’t read Goddess Muscle yet please do. Check out the celebration here. This is my piece:

Goddess Muscle is a gift. I can barely account for how it will stretch your reading muscles, your beating heart, your enquiring mind, your compassion, your music cravings, your empathy. Karlo has extended her own poetic muscle and offered poetry that is wisdom, strength, refreshed humaneness. I am all the better for having read it.

The collection is crafted like a symphony, an experience of shifting life, seasons and subject matter, so as you read the effects are wide reaching. Karlo faces significant political issues: climate change, the Commonwealth, colonialism, racism, Ihumātao, “the daily politics of being a woman, partner and mother”. She faces these global and individual challenges without flinching. The resulting poems are essential reading, never losing touch with song and heart, always insisting in poetic form how we can do better. How we can be a better world, recharge humanity. I would like to see these poems read in secondary school. You can read Moemoeā: (composed for poets for Ihumātao) here.

Karlo reads from Goddess Muscle here.

My review at Poetry Shelf

Poetry Shelf – poets on their own poems: Karlo Mila reads ‘For Tamir Rice with Love from Aotearoa’