Sick Power Trip, Erik Kennedy
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

Erik’s collection has stuck with me for a number of reasons. I have never read a collection quite like it and I love that. It feels like there are two significant settings. Firstly, an extraordinary band of wit and humour, with unexpected scenarios, shifting angles and points of view. Secondly, the necessary and imperative knottiness of humanity, from exposed self to a wider global reach. Not an either or view, but an incredible shifting light on how to live and how to survive. A poetic prism on the contemporary world that might be sharp, jagged, wise, personal.

Paula Green, Poetry Shelf

To celebrate placement on The Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry shortlist, I invited the four poets to choose some favourite things. Third up Erik Kennedy.

Erik Kennedy chooses favourites

Four photos
(a favourite object, place, poetry book, album)

Three sets of three

Three favourite words in your poetry toolkit
But, only, if. Powerhouses of rhetoric.

Three things that matter to you when you read and write poems
I like a first line that’s a poem on its own. I hope that if I’m being lied to in a poem, there’s a good reason for it. And I like to have my priors demolished.

Three poets who have inspired you
Agony to have to do this. Today . . . George Herbert, Norman MacCaig, Natalie Shapero.

One question

Why or how does your poetry book matter to you?
Well, it’s the truest of my books, both personally and artistically. And that feels big. I think readers have sensed that, because the reactions I have got to Sick Power Trip go far beyond anything I heard about the first two. It’s like it took me until my forties to be able to write with the honesty of a teenager. But it takes as long as it takes, I guess. 

One poem

Shop Floor Layout Algorithm

It was with palpable relief that, after a protracted illness, I got back to spending money again.

Economically inactive for October and November, I might as well have been dead instead of just feeling dead.

I got a glimpse of the great beyond, where there are no smart kettles reduced to clearance.

Now I have been in the aisles again, moving slowly and fragilely through the optimised layout of the world.

I have sojourned through an aisle rammed with 900 kilos of chocolate Santas I’m not going to buy because they’ve got dairy in them.

And I thought to myself, in the climate of that aisle, Not everything is about me. 

I thought about the things that are about me.

And I went to look for the aisle where they keep the fully-realised lives, doubtless alongside the wax food wraps and the fancy vinegars.

Erik Kennedy
from Sick Power Trip

Erik Kennedy (he/him) is the author of the poetry collections Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022) and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), both with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from New Zealand and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). His poems, stories, and criticism have been published in places like berlin lit, FENCE, The Florida Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS, and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Full Poetry Shelf review here and reading by Erik here

Erik picks a favourite poem from the book

Te Herenga Waka University Press page