Photo credit: Ebony Lamb

Poetry Shelf readings is a new series that celebrates recently published poetry collections with an audio performance. Louise Wallace’s collection, This Is A Story About Your Mother, is published by Te Herenga Waka University Press, May 2023. I will be posting a review of the book in the coming weeks. In the meantime take a listen to two poems:

‘Self portrait’

‘Blesséd goddess’

Louise Wallace is the author of three previous collections of poems. She is the founder and editor of Starling, and the editor of Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2022. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2008, winning the Biggs Prize for Poetry, and was the Robert Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, Dunedin in 2015. She grew up in Gisborne and now lives on the Otago Peninsula in Ōtepoti with her husband and their young son.

Te Herenga Waka University Press page