No Good, Sophie van Waardenberg
Auckland University Press, 2025

The word I write in my notebook in my latest reading is bridge, the way poems become a bridge, establish vital bridges. Think sweet and sour crossings, fluid and awkward, here and there, good and not good. Not as a restrictive dichotomy but as a series of movements, like music, like the way personal experience resists pigeon holes. Traversing the myriad bridges in Sophie’s sublime collection makes me both think and feel the world. Yes I am thinking and feeling a version of her world, but also a version of my world. And this moves me.

Paula Green, from Poetry Shelf review

To celebrate placement on The Ockham NZ Book Awards poetry shortlist, I invited the four poets to choose some favourite things. Fourthly, Sophie van Waardenberg.

Sophie van Waardenberg
chooses favourites

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

my bed! ideally with a cat on it and a pile of books nearby

the park near my house where I do my boring walks at sunrise & sunset

Three sets of three

Three favourite words in your poetry toolkit
You, I, whatever.

Three things that matter to you when you read and write poems
A question being asked; a rhythm; the alive and weird and particular voice of a human being.

Three poets who have inspired you
Frank O’Hara, Mary Ruefle, Emily Berry.

One question

Why or how does your poetry book matter to you?

I only really have selfish reasons: because it’s my first book, it’s proof for myself that I can draw a line under something and call it finished despite its imperfections. It’s also a relief that it exists, because it means I never have to write my first book again.

One poem

Sticky

A girl can have a piece of everything
as a treat. A girl can call her mother
to ask for love. A girl will superglue
her medicine together. A girl shovels
strawberries into her mouth for juice.
The sugar is enough to fill the hour.
A girl would like to ask for other fruit.
The other fruit falls thickly from the clouds.
A girl is filth and bright. A girl is born
out of comparison. A girl can sing or can’t.
A girl is held inside a duck’s bill, weighed
against a slice of bread for softness.
What flour is a girl made of? Wheat or corn?
How can a girl get clean again?

Sophie van Waardenberg

Sophie van Waardenberg is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University where she was editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her first chapbook, ‘does a potato have a heart?’, was published in AUP New Poets 5 (2019). Her poems about eating carbohydrates and kissing girls can be found in Cordite, Sweet Mammalian, The Spinoff and Best New Zealand Poems.

Listen to Sophie read two poems on Poetry Shelf: ‘Self-Portrait as Adolescent Covered in Flour’, ‘Hymn to the Insomniac in Fool’s Spring’

Sophie chooses a poem

Auckland University Press page