Please join Te Herenga Waka University Press, Nevertheless and Wardini Books for a celebration of Black Sugarcane, a landmark debut poetry collection by Nafanua Purcell Kersel. 

Wednesday 19 February
6pm
Wesley Community Centre, Hastings

🍃 🍂 🍃

A soft worrier, I’m Nua-No-Myth
speaking in centipede,
with a sweet hiding
in the dark of my cheek.

Restless in form and address, these engaging and generous poems ricochet from light to dark, quiet to loud, calm to violence. We meet a loved twin sister as she dives towards the Sacred Centre, a grandmother who knows everything by heart, a shrugging office clerk, and Nafanua herself, an enigmatic shapeshifter.

At the heart of Black Sugarcane is a sequence of erasure poems arising from the seminal essay ‘In Search of Tagaloa’ by Tui Atua Tamasese Ta‘isi Efi. From the worlds contained in the text, these poems rise as if inevitable. Another sequence responds to the devastating tsunami that stuck between the Samoan islands of Upolu and Tutuila in September 2009. Within the line, within the word and even the letter, these poems speak to creation and translation, destruction and regeneration.

Nafanua Purcell Kersel (Satupa‘itea, Faleālupo, Aleipata, Tuaefu) is a writer, poet and performer who was born in Sāmoa and raised in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa. Her poetry has been widely published. She has an MA from the IIML and won the 2022 Biggs Family Prize in Poetry for Black Sugarcane. She lives in Te Matau-a-Māui Hawke’s Bay.