by Helen Lehndorf

What does it mean to continue? Grandmother says that now is the time to ask ourselves what we are, other than ourselves. A piece. This is a moment mad for understanding. The body is a fence but it is also a wave and a thread in a fabric.

Joan Fleming from ‘Yana’, Song of Less, Cordite Books

2023 has served a dazzling array of books, across genres, from across the globe, and in particular, books published in Aotearoa. Local poetry books have stoked my heart, offered kaleidoscopic directions, hauntings, subject matter, challenges. Lifted me out of the mundane, and at times the weight of the world, for yes, this is a year of weight, a year of unbearable inhumanity in Gaza, climate change, and now an incoming coalition government that has, for me, intolerable values. Poetry can be a connecting force, whether deeply personal or acutely political. It feels necessary.

Poetry thrives in many places: from Bill Manhire’s much-loved presence on X / Twitter / Blue*** to dynamic poetry performances in cafes, inspired zines, new collections, stunning anthologies. For me, posting book reviews, the Monday poems and poetry readings has been a lifeline this year.

Importantly, poets in Aotearoa have called hard for a ceasefire in Gaza. Hana Pera Aoke and Khadra Mohamed organised a petition to send to political leaders and the Government. Kiri Piahana-Wong has been posting Palestinian poets on her Facebook page and selected five poems for Poetry Shelf. Anne-Marie Te Whiu selected a poem by Sarah M Salehs.

I invited poets to write a 2023 postcard, poets who have inspired and solaced me with stunning new books (some I have already read and reviewed, some I have read but still to review) and various other writings, blogs and audios. I suggested the poets could celebrate or bemoan anything – the space was theirs to fill.

My final review of 2023 was the extraordinary Big Fat Brown Bitch by Tusiata Avia, a book that affected me so very much. I did not manage to read all the poetry books I wanted to read – it just wasn’t possible at my snail’s, 8 tablespoons-of-energy pace – but I will read them. I am thinking of Ruby Solly, Dani Yourukova, Rushi Vyas, Dominic Hoey, Geoff Cochrane, Gail Ingram, Robyn Maree Pickens, Amber Esau and Damien Levi’s Spoiled Fruit: queer poetry from Aotearoa, Iona Winter’s grief anthology a liminal gathering, a Catherine Bagnall and Jane Sayle collaboration, and Landfall 246 and the new online Takahe presence.

2023 was a stellar year of anthologies: readings from Rapture: An anthology of performance poetry in Aotearoa, eds Carrie Rudszinski and Grace Iwashita-Taylor, (AUP), Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart, ed Anne Kennedy (AUP) review , readings from Te Awa o Kupu, eds Vaughan Rapatahana and Kiri Piahana-Wong (Penguin) and readings from A Kind of Shelter Whakaruru-taha: an anthology of new writing for a changed world eds Witi Ihimaera and Michelle Elvy.

I got to have conversations with a few poets; Michele Leggott’s Face to the Sky (AUP) offered such vital connections. I invented my own Poetry Shelf Cafe so I could hear exquisite readings such as Audrey-Brown Pereira read from a-wake-(e)nd (Saufo’i Press), Stephanie Montalk read from As the Trees Have Grown (THWUP), Hannah Mettner read from Saga (THWUP), Gail Ingram read from Some Bird (Sudden Valley Press), Claudia Jardine read from Biter (AUP), Diana Bridge read from Deep Colour (OUP), Jen Curtis read from Stone Men (Sudden Valley Press), Claire Orchard read from Liveability (THWUP), Leah Dodd read from Past Lives (THWUP), Arielle Walker and harold coutts read from AUP New Poets 9 (AUP),, readings from A Kind of Shelter (MUP) and readings from Takahē 107. Other cafe audio links below.

And it is a big shout out to Starling, an online journal that continues to shine a light on poets under 25.

With sadness Poetry Shelf has paid tribute to poets who have left us this year: Kevin Ireland, Peter Olds, Paula Harris, Rose Collins.

Our local publishers, from the universities to the boutique presses, have excelled in poetry publications this year. They care about poetry! They nurture both new and established voices, across styles and subject matter. They produce books with aroha and it shows. Thank you!

Poetry Shelf is taking an extended summer vacation but I look forward to celebrating poetry and furnishing this poetry hub at some point in 2024 all going well. I am so grateful for your participation, support and kind emails. Small gestures matter on my long challenging recovery road.

On Monday, to wrap up my blog, I am posting a terrific poem by Chris Tse, our current Poet Laureate, a poem that speaks to being a poet and indeed a human being in the ache of now.

Postcards 2023

Arihia Latham

Postcard from Arihia

The thing that has been consuming many of us in the last two months is the brutal genocide of Palestinian people despite many war crimes called out and the UN demanding a ceasefire. The economy of poetry has meant that we are able to receive words of excruciating beauty in moments of despair and chaos. It feels in light of what Palestinians are experiencing, it is hard to form words in return. Sometimes it is in the sharing of kai and kupu that we find pathways forward. I was lucky to be asked to read at Justice the Seed, Peace the Flower, a poetry event organised by Hala at Enjoy Gallery by Tehani Buchanan and Khadro Mohammad. I felt very aware of my place as tangata whenua holding the grief palpable in a room of many Palestinian, Middle Eastern and Muslim people gently showing up to share our words and perhaps the most expensive and delicious watermelon we had ever eaten. Poetry is a way of writing through languages, of plaiting together the metaphors of indigenous connection to land. Poetry is portable in times of difficulty and displacement as we can pass it on with our voices, with our phones and write it in the dust of our whenua. 

Poetry is expansive in its ability to give voice to the spaces between us, it speaks to the unseen and to those taken too soon. It is the language of aroha and tino rangatiratanga that connects us.

Arihia Latham (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha) is a writer, rongoā practitioner and cultural advisor. Her work has been widely published and anthologised. She lives with her whānau in Te Whanganui a Tara.

My review of Birdspeak (Anahera Press)

Arihia reads from collection

Anne Kennedy

Dear Paula, Thank you for asking me to write a virtual postcard about reading in 2023. (I remember exchanging actual postcards with you about reading [and life], in another life.) Since 6 October, nothing has made sense apart from a kind of helpless empathy. But I don’t want to not talk about my phenomenal reading experience before that point. It was, this year, Annie Ernaux, translated from the French (with an erchh on the r) who is in her 80s now. I don’t know why I’d never heard of her before. She has mostly written about her own life: about domestic moments, like Proust except she came from a working family so most of those moments were filled with work; about love and relationships, like Knausgaard except it included an illegal abortion as a young woman; about class shame, exuberance, about the history and politics that formed her. In the end: “There is no ‘I’… there is only ‘one’ or ‘we’…” (The Years). On my postcard I’m at the point where I’ll need to overwrite sideways like the Brontës so will finish here. To write about or talk about our lives there needs to be the first resource, life. Love, Anne

Recipient of a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement, Anne Kennedy is the author of four novels, a novella, anthologised short stories and five collections of poetry. She is the two-time winner of the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry, for her poetry collections Sing-Song and The Darling North. Her latest collection, The Sea Walks into the Wall, was shortlisted for the 2022 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In 2023 she

My review of Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Anne (AUP) with readings by Bill Manhire and Mohamed Hassan

Medb Charleton

Postcard from Light from Tate: 1700’s to Now at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Aotearoa New Zealand

On the 21^st of June this year I went to Auckland to see J.M. Turner’s Shade and Darkness – the Evening of the Deluge, on loan from Tate Britain. When I stood before it, expecting to be overcome by the furious fervour of one of the most famous painters of the Sublime, I found instead the usual impenetrability of something familiar. It was keeping close the secrets hard won by so passionate an artist. But I kept standing there, not wanting to give up, until its familiarity became strange again and the portentous arrow of birds in calligraphic flight took me into its vast disturbance of light. They seared the canvas like the mark of a branding iron wielded by a life-intoxicated prophet. Turner had braved an evening – and a subject – most take shelter from, maybe catch a wild glimpse of through the kitchen window and move on or cower in the bedroom or office until the storm passes. By venturing out into this painting, I gave it permission to illuminate the memory of a memory: a walk around the byways of my childhood home, steel light from all the sun’s compass points piercing the dark afternoon, making mirrors of wet roads, shirking off clouds in their indigos and violets to fall on half-clad trees while crows and ravens battled the wind like black kites. Jon Fosse, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature this year, once spoke about “writing into the unknown”. Seeing this painting by Turner reminded me that you have to take fear with you, nurture it, console it and let it be your guide rather than a weight to drag about because darkness and light go hand in hand and any time you have momentary license to flare in the dark for a while with your own borrowed light, you’ll be ready to face what’s there and receive it kanohi ki te kanohi.

Medb Charleton is originally from Ireland. She has published poetry in Landfall, Sport, Poetry New Zealand and online in Turbine | Kapohau.

Poem ‘A summer’s Day, December’    

Xiaole Zhan

Photo from a live performance of my piece for laptop, pianist, and hidden singer, Think an empty room, moonly with phoneglow

Think an empty room, moonly with phoneglow

I’ve been thinking a lot about digital spaces in my reading, writing and music this year—especially of the simultaneous intimacy and alienation of these spaces. I wrote an essay and a composition both titled Think an empty room, moonly with phoneglow. Living alone in Naarm, my main contact with my family is online. Though I almost exclusively speak to my mother in Mandarin, I am unable to read Chinese characters, so she texts me through Wechat in broken English which I mirror. Her peculiar way of texting has been a constant source of humour and poetry throughout the year. Once, I couldn’t stop laughing at the way she described administering flea medicine to our two family cats in Aotearoa with unintentional bluntness:

Kill fleas today.

Hope all die.

Another time, she texted me a cryptically poetic line in response to a composition I shared with her. I assume it was the consequence of a typo, but I copied it into my journal for safekeeping:

I can the young hearts.

Xiaole Zhan (they/them) is a Chinese-New Zealand writer and composer. They are the winner of the 2023 Kill Your Darlings Non-Fiction Prize and the winner of the 2023 Landfall Young Writers’ Essay Competition. Their name in Chinese, ‘小乐’, means ‘Little Happy’ but also be read as ‘Little Music’.

Poem ‘Candle‘

Bill Nelson

Postcard from Fiji

This year, the book I can’t stop telling people about is Middle Youth by Morgan Bach. It’s so good and everyone should read it. It has a kind of flame to the blade truth that great poetry collections often have. There’s no artifice or forced messages, just intelligence and intensity with splashes of anger, wit and dark magic. I read it while I was on holiday in Fiji which was possibly a strange choice, although it was a nice break from the frangipani and pinã coladas. I’m going to struggle to describe the book further without sounding like a bad Christmas card, so here’s a few lines I like.

‘…To explain the hesitance / I’ve tangled myself in, dehydrating in a trap / of distorted electrical impulses. It always goes wrong, / the explanation goes off course like a river bursting its banks, / the vulnerability I held back too long.’

‘You walk through churches you don’t believe in / with your body / you don’t believe in.’

‘To eat the sprouts / of plants is to eat potential / energy, the life force / of babies. Fill me / with the earth’s iron.’

Go get it before it wins a big important award.

Bill Nelson is the author of Root Leaf Flower Fruit and Memorandum of Understanding (both published by Te Herenga Waka University Press). He lives in Te Whanganui-a-tara Wellington with his partner, two children and his dog, Callimachus Bruce.

My review of Root Leaf Flower Fruit (THWUP)
Bill reads from collection

Kerrin P Sharpe

Who hasn’t returned to a poem or collection they’ve written to find it reads like someone else’s work? To find it exists because of you but in spite of you. To find it strangely aloof and self-contained. I have often felt like this so it was reassuring to read the late Louise Glück a wonderful writer, felt like this too. An article in The Guardian summed up her experience:  When she did write, she had little sense it was hers. This is very familiar to me. Just as the world seems to vanish when I write, maybe the poem born of silence returns there and only wakes when it is read by someone. Perhaps that is why there are so many interpretations of a single poem. For me it also raises a second question especially after a collection of poetry has just been published and the flames of a launch die down. Can I still write? I guess the only solution is to grow that silence and begin again.

Kerrin P Sharpe has published five collections of poetry (all with Te Herenga Waka University Press, Wellington, NZ) the latest Hoof, published October 2023. She has also had poems published in a wide range of journals both in NZ and overseas including Oxford Poets 13 (Carcanet Press), Blackbox Manifold, Poetry (USA), berlin lit (Germany), PN Review and Stand (UK). She has also appeared in Best New Zealand Poemssix times, Best of Best New Zealand Poems and The Best of Sport 2005-2019. In 2021 she was awarded a Michael King Writers Centre Summer Residency. 

My review of Hoof (THWUP)

Morgan Bach

It’s cheating I know, but one of the most impactful gigs of the year for me was Big Thief last December at the MFC in Wellington. December is a month that can belong to either year, I feel (it being my birthday month I’m going to make bold claims for its temporal fluidity!). This was a gig where the band to audience to band energy was palpable – I talked about this with my old teachers Damien Wilkens and Greg O’Brien at a launch early this year, and we agreed it was spectacular. The band seemed to love being there, and everyone in the audience was standing by the end of the gig. It felt exemplary of the give/take circle of energy that creative acts can be. My other favourite gigs of the year were Kevin Morby (I have dried the rose I caught!) and Ebony Lamb (both at Meow) – again the energy of both gigs was enlivening, and the musicians were on form and also seemed like thoroughly good people. Film-wise, try as I might I could not escape the Barbenheimer phenomenon – but its impact was only that it offered an accidental visual aesthetic parallel for my and Hannah Mettner’s double book launch. Launching with my dear friend was obviously a highlight of my year! Less happily, recent events have had me revisiting Emily Berry’s poem, ‘’Bad New Government’’, and James Brown’s ‘’The Wicked’’. I re-read these, as well as the poems of Tusiata Avia, Chris Tse, and many others in preparation for the ‘’poetics of rage’’ workshop at Verb (another highlight). To end on a high note, the poetry books by NZers that I’ve loved this year are too many to name, but some top picks are Leah Dodd’s Past Lives and Arihia Latham’s Birdspeak, I’m looking forward to and dreading the Ockham long list cos there are more books I wish would win than can be on that list. What an impossible task! Here’s to a 2024 of better news, and plenty of poetry.

Morgan Bach is from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her first book, Some of Us Eat the Seeds, was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2015. With Hannah Mettner and Sugar Magnolia Wilson, she was an original editor and co-founder of the literary magazine Sweet Mammalian. Morgan had the privilege of judging the National Schools Poetry Award this year, and her second book, Middle Youth, was published in August 2023.

My review of Middle Youth (THWUP)
Morgan reads from collection

Dani Yourukova

I’ve read statistically fewer books than usual this year, but, in fairness, it takes longer to read thousand page alternate-historical wizard books than it does to read poetry, or highbrow erotic thrillers about lesbians poisoning each other. Anyway! I’ve recently been enjoying Damien Levi and Amber Esau’s Spoiled Fruit anthology, which contains an absolute feast of sticky-sweet, fresh queer poetry. I was lucky enough to be at the Wellington launch, which was such a gorgeous cacophony of queer joy. And! The proceedings opened with a suite of music from Cadence Chung as composer and fellow contributor Jackson McCarthy’s poetry as the lyrics, in a showcase of outrageous, multi-disciplinary talent.

Now that I think about it, a great deal of the poetry I’ve loved this year has had a particular relationship with music. It sings through The Artist by Ruby Solly, which really hollowed out a space in my chest cavity and built a house there, and also in Leah Dodd’s Past Lives, which takes the mundane specifics of the  Wellington experiential landscape, and fills them with wonder, humour, tenderness and barely suppressed rage. Madison Godfrey’s Dress Rehearsals spans a personal history of mosh pits, pop hits and karaoke rooms, absolutely screaming with the sharp edges of queer desire. It also made me cry on a bus.

Claudia Jardine’s Biter has a music of its own, the music of translation, spaces, raspberries, silences and unopened blocks of cheese, and Selima Hill’s I May be Stupid but I’m Not That Stupid had me lying on the floor for about a week, with those perfect, sparse little jewels of poems. The Elective Mute sequence in particular kicked down the door to my childhood and set my Pokemon cards on fire. I also loved Shastra Deo’s The Exclusion Zone, for its haunted spaceship containment of post-apocalyptic video game trivia, and Alejandro Zambra’s absurd, playful and politically devastating Multiple Choice.
I’ve probably already talked too much, but when thinking about texts that have moved me this year, I do also need to mention a video game called Book of Hours. If you’ve ever wanted to relocate to a remote Welsh island, befriend the local midwife, and spend the rest of your life cataloguing arcane texts which may or may not be cursed while hand-feeding feral creatures from the moors, we should probably be friends. It also probably helps if you enjoy making excel spreadsheets.

Dani Yourukova is a queer Wellington writer who completed their MA in creative writing at The International Institute of Modern Letters. Their poetry and essays have been published in places such as Starling, Sweet Mammalian, Bad Apple, takahē, Stasis, Turbine | Kapohau and The Spinoff. Their debut collection, Transposium, was published by Auckland University Press in October 2023.

Dani Yourukova read from Transposium (AUP)

Jane Arthur

I want to cram a paragraph full of books I loved this year, though it won’t be enough: Below by David Hill is an almost literally unputdownable novel for early teens; Audition by Pip Adam is like an avant garde symphony built from anger and kindness, it changed my brain, and has no shit inspired me as a writer; I can’t talk about Barbara Else’s memoir Laughing at the Dark without yelling (in a good way) because I loved it so much; The Observologist by Giselle Clarkson is wise, gentle and very funny and will make people of all ages care about nature; The Artist by Ruby Solly is like some kind of poetic gift from another plane, I felt honoured to be able to read it (I love her); The Hero of this Book by Elizabeth McCracken is the international novel that took the cake for me this year – if you like Elizabeth Strout but jokes as well, read this (it’s funnysad). I could go on. What a year. What a bloody year. Thank god for books.

Jane Arthur is a Pōneke-based writer and manager/co-owner of the country’s only Living Wage bookshop, GOOD BOOKS. Her first poetry collection, Craven (VUP), won the Jessie Mackay Prize for best first book at the 2020 Ockham NZ Book Awards. Her second collection, Calamities! (Te Herenga Waka University Press) was published in May 2023. She has a debut children’s novel, Brown Bird, due for publication in May 2024 with Puffin/Penguin Random House NZ.

My review of Calamiities! (THWUP)
Jane reads from collection

Sue Wootton

Here, literally, is my postcard. It’s from Menton in the south of France. Because, how lucky I’ve been this year, finally able to take up the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship as I was originally scheduled to do in 2020. And on the back of the postcard, here’s my scrawl:

Bonjour à toutes et à tous! Menton really is as pretty and colourful as this. The sky is cornflower blue and it only rains oranges and lemons. Swim, write, siesta, write, eat, drink, write. C’est la vie, mes amis ! Wish you were here ! À bientôt. Sue

Sue Wootton is currently in Menton, France, as the fiftieth New Zealand writer to hold the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. Sue is a poet, novelist, short story writer and essayist, and in her usual day job is the publisher at Otago University Press.

Menton blog

Fiona Kidman

Photo credit: Robert Cross

So many books that made my heart sing this year. Just when you think that nobody could write another book that engages every sense, along comes another. I’m not lighting on poems this Christmas, rather a poet’s novel. Fiona Farrell has written The Deck, (Vintage) and it’s not just so much my best novel from Aotearoa New Zealand this year, but the best I’ve read in an age.

A plague threatens the country, and a group of friends retreat to the countryside, seeking safety. There they tell stories, revisit their past lives, reveal old secrets. The style draws on that of Giovanni Boccacio’s 14^th century The Decameron, and the form gives the characters (and Farrell, as their creator)  the opportunity to consider the role of the storyteller.

Fiona Farrell and I often get confused for each other. People tell me they love my new book and start telling me all about it. Well, I say, I wish I had written that, but it wasn’t me, if was eff eff, which is what I call her in private correspondence . And I, of course, am eff to her. I think the extra eff makes a difference, a whole other bag of tricks that I’d love to get my hands on.  But writing this about Fiona and her work has taken me back to her Selected poems, the beautifully produced  Nouns, Verbs etc. (Otago University Press 2020). I hear echoes of Seamus Heaney, no surprise that she is one of a band of New Zealand writers descended from the Irish. Try this, it’s part of a poem called “Julia at Tai Tapu”:

The paddock too is clad in silk.
Fine-grained, it falls as white as milk,
Like rain it shimmers, falling over
ryegrass, cocksfoot, sweet white clover.
Swamp and rivers we’d thought dead
rise, torchlit, clad in glittering thread.
And, sibilant, high fountains play
where Holsteins browse in naked day.
Thanks eff eff

From ‘eff aka Fiona Kidman’

Fiona Kidman has been writing novels, poetry, fiction and essays for the past 60 years  and the urge never really leaves her. Her last novel This Mortal Boy was awarded the Jann Medlicott Ockham Prize for Fiction, and other awards, including the Ngaio Marsh prize for best crime novel of 2019. Her work is published internationally. She lives in Wellington.

Fiona’s poem ‘sitting bird’

Megan Kitching

One book that utterly transported me this year was Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands. It’s a reverse history of the earth jumping back from 20,000 to 550 million years ago. Each chapter tours a complex, bristling and often bizarre ecosystem. I felt like a nineteenth-century reader encountering one of the blockbusters of early paleontology. Luckily, as this book revealed to me, the deep past is now much more than cabinet fossils and dinosaur bones. Otherlands is nature writing for places it’s only possible to visit ‘rockwise.’ Or science fiction where all the other planets are our own. Halliday writes so immersively and dynamically about even the smallest sponges or primitive trees, with real love and respect for their lifeworlds. He also throws in lovely Scottish words like ‘outwith’ (which I promptly stole for a poem). Apparently, I’m not the only one finding escapist fascination in the extinctions of the past, as we live through our own slow extinguishing. It’s a strange comfort to be reminded that life on this planet has been almost entirely wiped out, time and time again. Yet, somehow, it springs back. 

Megan Kitching was born in Tāmaki Makarau Auckland and now lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Queen Mary University, London, looking at the influence of the natural sciences on eighteenth-century poetry. Her poetry has appeared in many publications including The Frogmore Papers(UK), takahē, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, and Landfall. In 2021, she was the inaugural Caselberg Trust Elizabeth Brooke-Carr Emerging Writer Resident, and in 2023 she was runner up in the Caselberg International Poetry Prize. Her debut collection is At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press, 2023).

My review of At the Point of Seeing (Otago University Press)
Megan reads from collection

Louise Wallace

Photo of Poet Laureate Chris Tse, credit the Hawkes Bay Readers & Writers Trust

With a new book of my own poems out this year, it’s been really invigorating to get back into the live reading and festival scene (acknowledging my privilege to do so around health risks). Launching my book alongside Jane Arthur’s Calamities, at her very good bookshop Good Books in Wellington and the University Book Shop in Dunedin (for all your Christmas shopping needs), was super special. It was almost overwhelming seeing my pal Chris Tse officially take on the laureate mantle, bringing his trademark energy to events around the country, along with meeting and performing with so many talented creatives including Rushi Vyas and Nafanua Kersel. It was a privilege to host Jackson McCarthy and Xiaole Zhan in Ōtepoti | Dunedin as the Starling micro-residents for the New Zealand Young Writers Festival. And I loved the vibrant energy of this year’s Dunedin Writers & Readers Festival – Witi Ihimaera, Linda Tuhiwai Smith and Monty Soutar in conversation at Ōtākou Marae, as well as seeing my son’s creativity bubble over at a children’s session with Michaela Keeble and Tokerau Brown, based on their book Paku Manu Ariki Whakatakapōkai. Great news that DWRF have just released a podcast series of festival sessions, which you can listen to here. Ngā mihi! 

Louise Wallace is the author of four poetry collections with Te Herenga Waka University Press, the most recent being This Is A Story About Your Mother, published earlier this year. She was the guest editor for Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2022, and is the founder and editor of Starling, an online journal for young New Zealand writers.

My review of This Is a Story About Your Mother (THWUP)
Louise reads from collection

Joan Fleming

Dear Pōneke,

I came back to you this year, and you seemed to be okay with it. I landed in February, right after Cyclone Gabrielle, and the air in Wellington was eerie and still. I couldn’t recognise the city without the wind. That was temporary. You gave me a job (temporary). You gave me the most pressurised teaching semester of my life (temporary). By April, you had coated my stored-away sandals in white aspergillis mould (temporary). I planted shade-tolerant wildflower seeds in August, and up they came by October (temporary). Some days I felt young (temporary). Some days I felt older.

In the book I’m writing, there’s a young woman who is trying to work out, among other things, just how much of her womanhood she should feel bad about. Since adolescence, she has been addicted to visiting the mirror, and every time the mirror reassures her of her distance from perfection. It is always telling her, Yes you are older, which is to say, that much closer to the world’s universal No. One night she dreams she is looking down at her belly and thighs, and she sees the flesh there terraced into geometric lines and curves. She feels herself being excavated and moved by machines, being recessed and recessing. And yet, she knows in the dream that there is far more of herself than the machines can excavate. They can never eat her up anything close to completely, because she is far, far older than them.

When she wakes up and tries to explain this feeling to her fiancé, he is confused. ‘And that felt good?’ he says, discomposed. ‘It felt good to be old?’

Pōneke, the best night of the year was the Peaches gig you hosted for us back at the end of summer.  Peaches wobbled onto the stage at Meow on a zimmer frame, wearing nana glasses, fleshy nipple-stickers, fleshy nana undies, and a crown made of fleshy pantyhose fashioned into the shape of a vulva. Then, for the next two solid hours – the gig felt exquisitely, impossibly, fantastically long – she and her outfit set us on fire. She robed and disrobed. She thrashed, she rocked, she sweated, she jiggled and rippled and sang. She was unapologetic, brilliant, hilarious, and hot. At one point, she said, “I’m going to walk on you now,” then stepped out onto our hands and walked in the air.

A night like that gives one a certain profound kind of permission. In the book I’m writing, there’s a young woman who is trying to work out, among other things, just how much of womanhood she ought to set on fire.

Love always,
Joan
December, 2023

My review of Joan Fleming’s Song of Less (Cordite Books)

Speak the Mountain

for dear Banu

There is a mountain
There is a river
There is a lake

Hold the weeping child to heart
Hold the thirsty and the wounded to heart
Hold the dead and the fearful also to heart
Hold the rubble home and the broken bones

We speak the mountain
We speak the blood river
We speak the grief lake

Marching peace
Marching heart
Marching out

There is a mountain
There is a river
There is a lake

Paula Green, 23.11.23