Due to Covid-19 and the current number of cases in the community,
we are sorry to postpone this evening’s launch of
The Surgeon’s Brain by Oscar Upperton
until further notice.
We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.
Stay safe.
Dunedin Fringe presents
a premiere-packed programme for 2022
Festival dates: March 17-27
The Dunedin Fringe Festival is preparing to go ahead under the current ‘Red’ setting of the Covid Protection Framework, providing a supportive platform for artists to show their work and the opportunity for audiences to discover something new, whilst implementing a range of protocols to keep staff, artists and audiences safe.
An unmissable highlight in the festival calendar, the world’s southernmost fringe is back 17-27 March in Ōtepoti/Dunedin. This year’s programme is packed with premieres, offering audiences the chance to be the first to see innovative and experimental new work from established and emerging artists.
In Intoxicana, award-winning humourist Te Radar delivers a hilarious illustrated lecture revealing the untold stories of intoxicating substances from New Zealand’s past; vibrant dance double-bill Vivid Dreaming presents a collection of human experiences and issues set in the abstract worlds of our subconscious; and director Ruth Carraway (formerly of UK series Grange Hill and The Bill), works with a cast of people who have touched the prison system in theatre piece Been Through Enough.
First of its kind kaupapa Māori opera, Silence is, challenges preconceptions and explores the cacophony of physical, spiritual and political silences around us; while debut theatre The World’s First Lovers weaves a tapestry of Māori mythology and personal anecdote, combining the celestial realm and the human realm with personal stories that affect us all.
For the first time in Fringe history, delve into the world of fashion from the fringes Fashion X Fringe X Fashion in an event that highlights diverse, thoughtful, and challenging fashions from a selection of designers – current students, graduates and lecturers – all from Fashion at the School of Design, Otago Polytechnic.
Local artists take you on a unique voyage through Dunedin’s marine history. The salty crew of Sea Shanties and Salty Stories will take you across the harbour on a ferry while regaling you with tales and shanties from the salty brine; and GASP! Dance Inclusive explores the rich history of St Clair beach with a debut short film series, Promenade.
Tailored to Dunedin, Chris Priestly and the Unsung Heroes is an all-original musical theatre performance about New Zealand’s villains, rogues, and unsung heroes, led by Peter Elliot ONZM.
Festival Director Gareth McMillan said it was important in the face of yet another year of disruptions that the Fringe could offer support to smaller events with a lower risk profile to go ahead, and offer a platform to artists to continue to share their work and make an income.
“We are fortunate to be in a position to proceed with our Fringe events under the Red light restrictions and are taking extra precautions to make sure that this undertaking is as safe as possible,” he said.
“We hope that people will continue to support our artists as best they can, whether that be through coming along to an event if they feel comfortable, buying a ticket for someone else, or enjoying some of the online shows that are part of this year’s programme.”
This year’s online offering includes theatre pieces Rough Night and Shattered; dance pieces Promenade and Inherent Awkwardness; comedy from Rob McLennan: Pool Shark and Neechie-Itas; and performance art show Maggie Cocco’s Science for Sociopaths.
The festival’s comedic legacy will be upheld by a host of national comedy stars, including Taskmaster NZ’s David Correos, 2021 Billy T Award nominee Jack Ansett, Liv McKenzie (NZ Comedy Festival Best Newcomer 2019) and a split bill from Ben Hurley and a special guest.
Award-winning writer, performer and comedian Sarah Harpur returns to the Fringe in 2022 with her first comedy play, Shit Kid, which in its infancy was selected for the UNESCO Cities of Literature Short Play Festival in 2019. The fictional performance tackles topics such as the painful intersection between motherhood and ambition with delicate wit.
The Late Night Line Up will once again take over the Emerson’s Festival Theatre, every Thursday through Saturday of the Fringe, entertaining festival-goers into the night with a hand-picked itinerary of headline comedians and musical talent.
Artist collective Spectacle will present a dynamic, immersive, participatory pan-art show on the theme of disturbance; The Blue Oyster Art Project Space is delivering another stunning performance series; Jojo Marsh of Bondage Queen fame returns to Dunedin with A Nifty History of Evil, a hilarious journey through history’s biggest baddies; and Ōtepoti Hip Hop Hustle will be back and bigger than ever for 2022, presenting the four elements of hip hop: DJing, MCing, dance, and graffiti art.
The 11-day festival programme also offers the opportunity to explore art in different spaces.
Fancy watching a live Shakespeare performance from the comfort of your garden? This year you can with The Barden Party! A small troupe of travelling actors will be bringing music, mischief, magic to Dunedin gardens in a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Shakespearean performance is peppered with folk-like renditions of popular music ranging from Billie Eilish to Wham.
Surround yourself in sound with STORK AND GAMELAN, a piece made up of traditional and improvised compositions using gamelan – a traditional, large scale instrumental ensemble; and find art in surprising spots across the city with Cargo Bike Art Space offering an ever-changing programme of artists, showcasing artistic works of projection, puppetry, and sound.
publicity@dunedinfringe.org.nz.
Dunedin Fringe thanks all our supporters. Core funding is gratefully received from:
The Sea Walks into a Wall, Anne Kennedy, Auckland University Press, 2021
On the beach, always an aftermath of a wedding
froth and a mess of ribbon and glass,
a runway for lost souls returning
a regret.
Tangaroa is like butter in the sun today.
I love the wall. I pummel the wall. My hands are on
the warm, grey, post-industrial wall.
In the next storm, the sea will take the wall
back into its real-time, moving, shining
thing.
My heart is like a wall
struck down in a storm.
You didn’t even need that wall
at all.
from ‘The Sea Walks into a Wall’
Opening a new collection by Anne Kennedy is always a delight. Her 2021 collection The Sea Walks into a Wall confirms she is one of Aotearoa’s most inventive and assured poets. She weaves autobiographical traces along a musical clef with a roving mind and linguistic agility. She touches upon matters of the heart, political issues that demand voice, multiple themes. The Sea Walks into a Wall is shortlisted for Ockham NZ Book Awards, and it is easy to understand why her poetry has received multiple awards to date.
The opening poem ‘Flood Monologue’ features a stream as protagonist: a companion stream, a sick stream, a raucous stream. The poem is lithe and witty, complex and plain. It is the perfect gateway to a collection that renders streams and currents into poetic existence. You absorb poetic movement as process, thought, revelation. Helen Rickerby says on the back of the book, Anne has produced ‘a treasure trove’. And indeed she has.
I keep returning to the poetry as tidal movement. The poet is pausing, adding, refining. Anne plays with the melody, employing strong and weak beats, short and long phrasings. The collection’s tidal music is exquisite in the ear. Nowhere more so than in the title poem ‘The Sea Walks into a Wall’. What is said laps against what is not said, daily life ripples alongside a reading life and a thinking life. The waves shimmer with both past and future, the present a luminous constant. It is the kind of poem that keeps pulling you back in, like a swimmer pulled back into ocean enchantments.
‘In the Way’ is not water focused, yet its tidal effect is a wave-smash of feeling, hauntings perhaps, as the lines spiral and loop and cut back. This is a poem of family and home, like a curling fable, with an aromatic arrival of distractions, subtractions, contractions. How to live? How to be? Things get ‘In the way’, and as the repeating line reiterates, ‘Love fills the room like a maze’.
For several months you hold the car door open for toddlers.
Weeks watching the progress of mercury in a thermometer.
Several years the pages of critical theory kept you from death.
A poem kept you from death.
A big wind gathers out at sea.
There’s another thing like a box and you don’t know what’s in it.
You walk together in the forest and the forest is a thing.
from ‘In the Way’
I love the way the collection as a whole cannot pinned down to narrow keys, form, lengths, and the tonal shifts and reaches (like the ocean) are exactly what adds pleasure to the reading experience. There is an ongoing sense of the poet speaking to you the reader. Alongside a plainer poem (with its own complex delights) there will be a denser treat. ‘Warp and Aho: A Part-life in Flax’, with its thatch and weave and lace holes, is a tour de force occasion. A poem that hooks you into its stitching, line after line, with linguistic deftness, multiple languages, personal musings, opinions, admissions, and again, even though this is a poem of weft and weave, I am reminded of the glorious movement of the ocean.
Anne has produced the kind of poetry collection that demands repeated readings, in multiple states of mind, in diverse reading locations. It will astonish, challenge, transport and soothe. A sumptuous and satisfying reading experience.
Anne Kennedy is the author of three novels, a novella, four books of poetry, and many anthologised short stories. Her first book of poetry Sing-song was named Poetry Book of the Year at the 2004 Montana New Zealand Book Awards. The Darling North won the 2013 New Zealand Post Book Award for Poetry, and Moth Hour was a poetry finalist at the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Anne has also won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award and has held fellowships at the University of Auckland, the IIML, and at the University of at Hawai‘i. She has taught creative writing for a number of years in Hawai‘i and Auckland.
You can read ‘Fox and Hounds’ previously published on Poetry Shelf
Auckland University Press author page
Judges’ comments on books here
The shortlist – from a longlist of 40 books by four panels of specialist judges (for fiction, poetry, illustrated non-fiction and general non-fiction) – includes both literary luminaries and first-time authors.
Rob Kidd, the convenor of judges for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, says the finalists in this category refuse to be pinned down by genre.
“These novels are packed with life in an array of ordinary and extraordinary forms; they all swell with vitality. A Good Winter by Gigi Fenster is an unnerving and absorbing reading experience as the darkness gradually closes in. Bryan Walpert’s Entanglement is dazzlingly intelligent and ambitious in scope. Rebecca K Reilly’s Greta & Valdin is gloriously queer, hilarious and relatable, and Kurangaituku by Whiti Hereaka is poetic, intense, clever and richly imagined.”
The American writer, editor and literary critic John Freeman will assist the three New Zealand judges to select the fiction winner, who this year will take home a prize of $60,000.
Saradha Koirala, convenor of judges for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry says the four category finalists have pushed their craft to new limits, giving us outstanding examples of how our literary voices have evolved.
“In a time of global instability, Aotearoa poets have reconnected to their sense of self, exploring identity and challenging our collective history. Tayi Tibble’s Rangikura pays tribute to millennial culture and uses the power of humour, sexuality and friendship to create a collection that encapsulates this generation of Aotearoa. In Sleeping with Stones, Serie Barford demonstrates her ability to use simple eloquence to write about complex matters. Anne Kennedy creates poems that are consistently engaged with issues of the anthropocene in The Sea Walks into a Wall, and the pristine imagery and fine ear for rhythm and beat means each of Joanna Preston’s poems in Tumble are a celebration of poetry,” says Ms Koirala.
The judges found the four finalist books in the Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction impossible to exclude in both their exemplary individual qualities as books, and the insight and depth they all bring to their varied and valuable content, says convenor of judges Chanel Clarke.
“Particularly outstanding this year are a number of well-researched yet not so well-known histories and herstories, beautifully delivered, that invite surprising new understandings of ourselves. Dressed: Fashionable Dress in Aotearoa New Zealand 1840 to 1910 by Claire Regnault is a beautiful and beguiling book that will seduce a wide audience. In NUKU: Stories of 100 Indigenous Women, Qiane Matata-Sipu gracefully presents her subjects in their own words and through her tremendous portrait photography. Shifting Grounds: Deep Histories of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland by Lucy Mackintosh is a fresh and timely study that weaves multiple narratives into a highly readable story and The Architect and the Artists: Hackshaw, McCahon, Dibble by Bridget Hackshaw is a thorough and beautifully produced triangulation of creative practice,” says Ms Clarke.
Nicholas Reid, convenor of judges for the General Non-Fiction Award says the category finalists stand out not only for their individual excellence in research, story-telling and deep insight, but also for their contribution to the ongoing narrative of what it means to be a New Zealander.
“Each work brings deep insight and beautiful writing to their subjects, which included three very different autobiographies and a work of remarkable historical scholarship. From the Centre: A Writer’s Life by Patricia Grace is a rare literary memoir, free of egotism; Dave Lowe’s The Alarmist: Fifty Years Measuring Climate Change has a rich texture of family and a clear awareness that members of the scientific community are not always in harmony; the prose in Charlotte Grimshaw’s The Mirror Book is exquisitely precise in its navigation of the complexity of the author’s family dynamics, and Vincent O’Malley helps readers to think critically as he presents balanced arguments about contested battles and other conflicts in Voices from the New Zealand Wars | He Reo nō ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa.
Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction
Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry
Booksellers Aotearoa New Zealand Award for Illustrated Non-Fiction
General Non-Fiction Award
The Canterbury Poets Collective is delighted to announce their short-list (in no particular order) of manuscripts submitted to the John O’Connor Best First Book competition.
Congratulations to these successful poets! Their manuscripts have been forwarded to Elizabeth Smither for adjudication.
Gregory O’Brien is currently creating covers for PN Review. They are simply glorious. The latest cover (263) also features an exquisite new Bill Manhire poem. The combination has prompted me to take out a subscription. I keep looking and rereading, relooking and reading. This is what poetry and art can do. The effect here is enigmatic, mysterious, musical, topical, physical, and utterly of these unsettling times. Both the poem and the art make me feel the bliss of colour and line, image upon image, and then I feel like weeping for the light and the dark, in the light and the dark, for the containment and the contained. The echo mantra that ‘we are all walking in the same direction’ haunts.
Some Other Words I Think They Sang
Insects singing in the night.
We were all walking in the same direction.
Be careful. Be strong. Be kind.
That’s what they sang.
Sing when the world is worn away.
Some other words I think they sang.
Insects singing in the night.
We were all walking in the same direction.
Bill Manhire
PN Review newsletter
arrow / town
I was born out of love, or at least half-love
necessity-love, only-way-we’ll-get-out-alive
sort of love, only half better than wanton. I
asked my father if my great-grandmother loved
her husband that she didn’t get to choose, and he
told me well, they had ten children. Ten
children seems to me more like a curse. Ten
rips in the skin, ten lives, ten wet tears in
the petty space time gives us, your name on
their tongues as they cry. I lack a common tongue
with my ancestors, but even so I know they ask
me to smile. I owe my ancestors happiness. I owe
them proof that they did not suffer in vain. I view
the sunsets and dive into lakes wearing petticoats
just to look at the sky in the opposite of spite, to
show them I am doing something with the time
they gave me. When I went to an old Chinese
settlement, a mother with her kids presented the
mud houses, the scrappy shipping-container roofs.
People lived here, she said. Her tone was that
of a real estate agent, selling them the world, or
at least an easy-to-stomach history. I prefer to
say it like a prayer, in a soft, lonely rhythm:
people lived here. People lived here. People lived here.
Cadence Chung is a poet, student, and musician from Wellington. She draws inspiration from Tumblr posts, antique stores, and dead poets. Her debut poetry chapbook anomalia is coming out in March/April 2022.
Over summer I have been mulling over what I want Poetry Shelf to do in 2022. I want it to be a connection hub for readers, performers and writers. A place to share poetry we create and poetry we love. A place of reviews, interviews, audio, videos, ideas, features. A regular noticeboard. Whatever takes my fancy.
With the world beyond my rural backdoor feeling crazier and more threatening, I am compelled to get both my blogs up and running as soon as possible. We need the media critiquing the madness and mayhem, but we also need balm, beauty and delight for ears and eyes, hearts and minds.
However, this year is slightly different for me as I have a serious health issue. Doing my blogs and writing books gives me energy and heart. I love doing Poetry Shelf and Poetry Box. I love the way it brings us together. I love the way it runs on a currency of kindness and good will. Delights in words and what they can do.
This year I may not answer your emails, I may or may not review your book, I may not answer the phone. At times there may be radio silence. I definitely won’t be venturing out-into the world because it is just too risky. But Poetry Shelf is a way of forging vital connections beyond the kitchen and garden.
Thanks!
May your days gleam with poetry.
Ngā mihi nui
Paula x
Stretch Marks
(20 Sep 2021)
On looking
at my naked body.
Knowing you will be
Looking.
My body is ripped
with silver linings.
Stretch marks.
A weave of flex.
when my world got too big for me,
bearing babies
or burdens.
Stretch marks.
Invisible inked in skin.
Traces I needed to suddenly hide,
Dive in, submerge into skin
safer unseen
from predator, prowler,
prey.
Oh luminous seal
with quick thick thighs
you dived underwater
thick-pelted, you hide,
Unseen.
Beached.
The loneliness of mammals.
Alone in the deep blue deep.
Gestating to a saline rhythm .
All my own.
All alone.
Skins grown
and shed.
Stretch marks.
A spider webbed weave
of vibrating threads.
Silks spun,
and undone.
The painful crack
of the shell of my understanding
breaking.
Growth.
Shedding full body armour
of weta skin, mine and others –
left behind –
with prayers on parting.
The coconut husk –
wringing cream and water
to try and see my future
in the milk of ancestral fluids.
The cocoon
of caterpillar storybooks
cake and pickle and pie,
so hungry.
The black butterflied chrysalis
of love poetry written in my 30s.
That well written body indeed.
Here it is.
Looking for love
Same songs
different sounds.
Re-makes.
Re-takes.
Re-release.
Re-mastered.
I am always entranced
by the acoustic version,
almost poetry.
Sound healing.
Sexual healing.
I have been waiting for you so long,
Karakia even.
Hope.
Asking.
Please.
It’s been too long.
Too alone.
I’m too human.
Across time and space,
He arrives, rain.
softly quoting hurricane.
He comes
in front of me,
sticky embryonic.
Ultimate tōhu
of fertility. newness. rebirth.
remake. Remaster.
We cross digital divides,
magic echnologies of presence.
wonder-lust, the marvellous.
the surreal sexuality of screens.
Missionary position
is my favourite way
to look at you.
Mirrored
Reflection
You see
Beauty.
Speak it out loud.
Small scars on my body speak
to trauma worn, scribbled on skin.
Stretch marks.
Paper thin.
Will you see me? My frailty?
Will you want?
The small gods of chemistry
are king.
Will you want to
Come in?
Already I imagine you
in my mouth. Salty. Sweet. Big. Deep.
Oceanic.
De-col. it’s everywhere.
Even in the seabed and foreshore of play… can I play? Can I say?
Will you stay?
Trust. in the 21st century
of unconditional lovers
where it only lasts as long
as the longing.
I want nothing but.
Having settled for less.
I want no settler.
I want native.
Natural.
Ease.
But these stretch marks speak to small anxieties,
cartography of flesh.
I take a deep breath.
With these silver threads:
Tuia ki roto
Tuia ki waho
Tuia ki raro
Tuia ki runga
I stitch. I sew. I bind.
Both of us
gasping for breath
in this ocean we have
Leap of faithed
into.
Oh departing place
of the spirits
watch over us.
Trust.
Deepak recasts it as moving into the unknown
beyond the prison of the past.
I listen to his lilting words:
“Today, I will step into the unknown.
I will relinquish the known.
By stepping into the unknown
I will enter in the field of unlimited possibilities.”
This is our place.
The field
beyond write and wrong.
Between hema and mata’u.
The field between other husband and other wife.
The field between us.
There is no map-making to be had
using the small cursive script of the past. Prisons.
I cast away my own incarcerated markings,
scribbles, notes, past poems, tiny wounded stories.
I will give up the need to track-back
the way out
To tightly pencil a safe way in.
To re-make the boundaries. To fortify.
To try and control the way home.
I will leave the birds-eye to my ancestors,
keeping an ear open only
to the manu that tangi
keeping our forest alive.
This field.
I step, I step,
Knowing I will be naked,
humbled, human,
vulnerable, ashamed,
afraid, and aroused,
I step, I step
into our field
of infinite possibility.
In this green grass,
I will lie
and meet you there.
Karlo Mila
Karlo Mila (MNZM) is an award winning Pasifika poet of Tongan / Palangi descent. Her third poetry book “The Goddess Muscle” was released by Huia Publishers in 2020. Her first book won the first best book award at the New Zealand literary awards in 2005. She is a Mother, writer, researcher, creative, academic and activist. Her day job is as the Programme Director of the Mana Moana Experience at Leadership New Zealand. Karlo is the founder and creator of Mana Moana – aimed at elevating and harnessing indigenous Pacific knowledge for contemporary living and leadership. It is based on five years of postdoctoral research. Karlo has three sons and lives in Auckland.
NZ Poetry Shelf 