Join us and Time Out Bookstore on Tuesday 7 July at 6pm to celebrate the publication of AUP New Poets 12, with Anuja Mitra, Loretta Riach and Zephyr Zhang, with Anne Kennedy, our marvellous New Poets editor, who will launch the book.

The book isn’t officially out until 9 July, so come along to Time Out and get a special early copy, and hear these talented poets read from their collections. This event is the first in Time Out’s Winter Poetry series, so mark your diaries for all three events this July and August.

AUP New Poets 12 brings together three careful observers of the everyday and the ineffable. Anuja Mitra, Loretta Riach and Zephyr Zhang tell of wandering through cities, ghostworking from office cubicles and sweating through heat waves and tax season; of grappling with questions of alienation, belonging, lust and grief.

Though irreverence and a generational malaise might hover at the poems’ edges, tenderness forms their centre, as when Zhang encounters a house on the back of a truck in the small hours of the morning:

I would say look!
how lucky we are
to know that magic still happens
if we stay awake to see it

With humour, vulnerability and flair, these collections navigate being young in precarious times – and mark the arrival of three confident new voices in New Zealand poetry.