Join us for this special celebration with The Cuba Press. We’ll be launching Wonderland by Tracy Farr and Tackling the hens by Mary McCallum.
Wonderland by Tracy Farr was the winner of the NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize 2024 that’s already received high praise: ‘Passionate, beautifully constructed, sorrowful and yet immensely hopeful.’—Fiona Kidman.
‘Mesmerising. A book that leaves you filled with wonder, and deeply moved. I loved it.’ Gigi Fenster.
Mary McCallum is a writer and publisher who lives in the Wairarapa and Pōneke. Tackling the hens is her new poetry collection. Her own published work includes award-winning novel The Blue, a poetry book XYZ of Happiness and a children’s novel Dappled Annie and the Tigrish.
All welcome to celebrate these two new, wonderful books.
over under fed, Amy Marguerite Auckland University Press, 2025
Poetry Shelf so often reminds me we don’t work in a vacuum, that we write out of, alongside and sidepaths from what we read, that we are nurtured by writers that catch our hearts, that challenge and feed our intellects. As the title suggests, Amy Marguerite’s debut collection, over under fed, navigates various hungers, but it also satiates, as both reader and writer. Amy mentions two literary lifelines: Virginia Woolf and Eileen Myles. And poignantly, she thanks editor Emma Neale for prioritising ‘tenderness and curiosity’ in the collection. My skin is prickling.
from here the lovely thing (that i do not know
to be lovely yet) ascends to the pleasure centre of the brain
from ‘reuptake inhibitor’
Amy is writing of her experience with anorexia nervosa, a difficult infatuation and a spiky relationship. A whirlpool of hunger. An eddy of cravings and desire. Tough stuff. Yet two words, light and loveliness, instil a drumbeat, an insistent pattern beneath the propelling smash of living and a syncopated recovery map.
As I read, I keep falling into a borderzone of oxymorons where loveliness might not be lovely, where full becomes empty, or emptyfull, or where close smudges far, where is rattles is not, it’s pain and relief, absence and presence. And it is strange and wonderful and utterly recognisable.
Self exposure is a risky form of charting ways of being. Think acute and full-throttle feeling: ‘my poetry is firing / steel-capped neurons / at the waistline of / stale grief’. Or the temptation to burn ‘diaries / in a roasting dish’. Then again. Then again. It is ellipsis and hints, wit and sublime nuance.
[ … ] i dream of the day my eyes are the seeds of a green bell pepper. the world is already far too blue and squinting at what light.
from ‘far too blue’
More than anything, over under fed, is catch-in-the-throat writing – not just the subject matter – but how the words on the line sing. The visual and aural catch in ear and eye heightens the poetic rewards, the surprises. It is both startle and delight as you read.
let yourself submerge in a puddle of your own making
from ‘only womb’
Press your finger into the poem, upon the skin of its making, feel its beating heart and warmth and chill, and then again, warmth. Herein is the texture, the tactile, the finger touch of poetry. This collection. This collection, navigating the pulse of illness and recovery, reflection and refraction, whether self or world. Put your finger on the pulse of wonder and feel what poetry currents can do.
A reading
‘managing isolation’ and ‘love language’
A conversation
Were there any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges as you wrote this collection?
Oh totally, heaps! This collection took a heck of a lot of patience. Some poems took me eight or nine years to write, so I was sitting in the waiting room for a truly maddening time! Perhaps the most irritating thing was feeling as though this room was at once of my own making and entirely beyond my control. That was my body being clever and protecting itself, but I didn’t know that then. I doubt that this new knowledge will make the wait any more tolerable in future, just maybe more understandable, and I think I can love that.
What matters when you are writing a poem? Or to rephrase, what do you want your poetry to do?
What matters most to me now as a writer is messiness and silliness. There was a time when I thought poetry had to look like a well-made bed in order to be considered good poetry—or even just poetry—but now all I really want to see, both in my own writing and in the poetry I consume, is a bed that hasn’t been touched since sleep, a pillowcase that resembles the peeled-back wax coating of a Babybel cheese, and a bottom sheet stamped with menstrual blood. I am increasingly attracted to this kind of disarray.
Are there particular poets that have sustained you, as you navigate poetry as both reader and writer?
Eileen Myles! I can’t remember how I initially came across it but there’s this one interview with Eileen called “A Poem Says ‘I Want’” that really worked some magic on me. In this interview Eileen describes how, up until “some piece in the 20s”, they were constantly making decisions but “never taking any steps”. They also mention how they were constantly writing poetry during that time but didn’t really notice because it didn’t seem important, until they wrote what they thought to be a “good poem” while at work one day. It was then that they were like, “Huh. What if the poem is real and all this is not?” I remember pausing the interview right here and choking on my own saliva (I was also smiling a lot so that was deeply uncomfortable). I already knew that poetry was the real thing and that work (Eileen’s “all this”) was not, but still there was this new sense of wondering all over me. It is all well and good to think that poetry is the real deal, but is it really, if you aren’t acting as though it is?
It became brutally clear to me that my thinking about poetry was inconsistent with my treatment of it and my god this realisation hurt. It had to hurt. If “the throughline was poetry”, as Eileen so beautifully puts it, then my behaviour really needed to reflect that, so I started doing things that had previously seemed kind of outrageous to me: instead of defaulting to my job title, I’d introduce myself as a poet, and instead of keeping quiet for fear of sounding silly, I’d tell the people at the dining table or in the lecture theatre what I thought about a book or poem.
This interview continues to wake me up, as does Eileen’s poetry—I’m repeatedly startled by it in the most beautiful, transformative way.
We are living in hazardous and ruinous times. Can you name three things that give you joy and hope?
I’m feeling extremely hopeful about the refreshed eating disorders strategy, which will introduce “new roles like lived-experience peer support workers and family peer support workers”. You can read all about it here. Other than that, my relationship with my partner and the brilliant conversations I have with him and my friends and their friends and also complete strangers at dinner parties.
Amy Marguerite (she/her) is a poet, essayist and librarian living in Tāmaki Makaurau. In 2022, she completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Her debut poetry collection, over under fed, is out now with Auckland University Press.
We moved so often there seemed no space between arriving and departing, interrupting and interrupted, and no one waving. But one of my English teachers told me, Books will sustain you.
But I clutched the turning page like the last straw in a constant wind of change, wishing I could distil the books and drink the stories, to find out who loved who and if one of them was me.
David Gregory
David Gregory arrived in Christchurch NZ from the UK on a three year contract in 1982 and found a supportive literary community here. In spite of spending a year back in England on a job exchange, the pull of NZ was strong for him and his family. That whanau has grown to include four grandchildren. He has worked on coastal environmental issues for most of his working life. He has combined this with establishing his reputation as a New Zealand poet with three books to his credit and a fourth due to be launched soon.
His poetry has appeared in many NZ publications and a number of anthologies and has been performed at venues in NZ and overseas.David is a founder member of the Canterbury Poets Collective. With the late John O’Connor, himself a noted poet, he established Sudden Valley Press (SVP). SVP has published over thirty well-received poetry books. David is the current Manager and one of the editors for Sudden Valley Press.
I am thinking of the great cedar in front of my house the feeling of flying with pīwakawaka, tauhou and tūī when I gaze out the second-storey window high on the hill
I am thinking of the drone views of fires that started the year, orange sky over brown slopes, animals scurrying to safety among 23,000 acres aflame in LA’s surrounds
I am thinking of the idea of refuge
I am thinking of our Aotearoa spaces, the National Parks Act of 1980 that saw natural beauty as something worth reserving, as something of ‘national interest’
I am thinking of US public lands, some 28% of this vast terrain, area declared protected and out of reach of human avarice
I am thinking of the idea of refuge
I am thinking of the 20,000 rangers and the fragility of their jobs, people working for the Everglades, the Smoky Mountains and Zion National Park, named for the idea of refuge
I am thinking of the idea of refuge
I am thinking of scientists at Fish and Wildlife whose work is to see things we don’t see every day, of civil servants whose job is to serve our planet in ways we may not consider from our comfortable homes
I am thinking of the rare beetles and spiders who have little protection now, of the black-footed ferret, endangered with no voice of its own, of spotted owls and silent manatee, of little birds found only in tropical forests in Hawai‘i, of the grizzly and grey wolf, their majesty disregarded
I am thinking of the idea of refuge
I am thinking of the lumber company exec who manages our forests, of the new order to log two-hundred-eighty- million acres
I am thinking of Thoreau; I am thinking we can never have enough nature
I am thinking of the discarded safety measures founded in the US Endangered Species Act, granting protection for more than half a century, but if a tree falls in a forest we cannot protect, do we hear the sound?
I am thinking of the great cedar outside my window, guarded under Aotearoa law, a haven for small souls
I am thinking of the idea of refuge
I am thinking of Robin Wall Kimmerer and a life of reciprocity, of Mary Oliver eating the fish
I am thinking of Wendell Berry, poet citizen farmer living for the land
I am thinking of what Selina said Hone said
I am thinking of the idea of refuge
I am thinking of the orphan bear cub, saved by Taoseño from wildfire and nursed back to health, Smokey the new symbol of forest fire prevention, living a long and protected life – I met him when I was a kid, on a field trip to the National Zoo
I am thinking of the idea of refuge
I am thinking of Ursula Bethell’s Pause hanging over my desk, of Brian Turner, wild hearts and Wild Dunedin I am thinking of land as a poem and the language of Joy Harjo with her horses
I am thinking of John Muir and how to reach the universe through forest wilderness
I am thinking of the idea of refuge
I am thinking of protection, I am thinking of safety I am thinking of the rumble of words on the page
I am thinking of how to see the forest and the trees
I am thinking of the idea of refuge
I am thinking of Gilgamesh cutting down the biggest cedar I am thinking of that ancient story, how great trees fall and walls rise
Michelle Elvy after more news of more firings in the US, early April 2025
In this evening event, Poet Laureate Chris Tse and fellow poets Mary Macpherson, Arihia Latham, Margo Montes de Oca, Ada Duffy, Simon Sweetman, and Jackson McCarthy, will read new work in response to photographs of 19th Century Aotearoa from the exhibition A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa.
Chris Tse (he/him) was born and raised in Lower Hutt, New Zealand. He studied film and English literature at Victoria University of Wellington, where he also completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. In 2022, he was named the 13th New Zealand Poet Laureate. His poetry, short fiction, and non-fiction have been recorded for radio and widely published in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies. He has published several collections of poetry and his latest book Super Model Minority (2022) was long-listed for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2023.
Ada Duffy (Kāi Tahu Whānui) is a poet who was raised in Ōtākou under the shelter of Pukekura.
Arihia Latham (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Waitaha) is a writer, creative, and rongoā practitioner. Her poetry collection, Birdspeak, was published by Anahera Press in 2023, and her short stories, essays, and poems have been published and anthologised widely. Arihia’s poetic short film, Takaroa, was part of Mana Moana and won best film at the Aotearoa Poetry Film Festival. It has since screened in Italy and will be shown at the Helios Sun Poetry Film Festival in Mexico. Arihia is also an arts columnist for The Post. She lives with her whānau in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
Mary Macpherson is a poet, photographer, photobook maker, and art writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington. Her poems have been published in print and online journals in Aotearoa, most recently in Landfall, The Spinoff, and Ōrongohau | Best Zealand Poems. Mary’s poetry collection, Social Media, was published by The Cuba Press in 2019. Her photographs are in the collections of Te Papa Tongarewa, The Dowse Art Museum, and Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery. She is a part of the team who organise Photobook/NZ, Aotearoa’s biennial photobook festival at Te Papa. She is currently working on a photobook to be published with Rim Books, called one foot on the bottom, which uses her mother’s family photographs mixed with her contemporary work.
Jackson McCarthy is a poet and musician from Auckland who is currently studying in Wellington. He is of mixed Māori and Lebanese descent. His work has been published widely, including Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Landfall, Starling, and The Spinoff. He currently serves as an editor at both Symposia and Salient magazines.
Margo Montes de Oca is a poet and researcher of Mexican and Pākehā descent living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara.
Simon Sweetman is a music journalist, short story writer, and poet.
Clay Eaters, Gregory Kan Auckland University Press, 2025
To wander
Looking for what we have lost
On that other side of silence
A surface that lets us write so many things into it
Knowing the little that we know
In the few ways we know how
Gregory Kan from Clay Eaters
I have just finished reading Gregory Kan’s Clay Eaters and I am caught in an eddy of multiple hauntings. How to translate this transcendental state of reading? How to share this poetry nourishment? I will begin with the notion that the collection resembles a landscape of braided rivers: a polyphonic source, the tributaries, the gentle currents and the torrents, the obstacle boulders and the jagged edges, the ripples and the calm. The beauty. The fierceness. The shifting waters. The place to stand and ponder. The place to stand and be. Poetry as braided river. Poetry as wonder.
Poetry that is personal and invented and incredibly moving.
Who were you, really
Outside of us, outside of me
Outside of all my
Useless bargaining
There are autobiographical braids. The family who moves from Singapore to Aotearoa. The poet who returns to Singapore six years later to do compulsory military service on Pulau Tekong. A father who suffers a stroke. A partner and a beloved cat who dies. Siblings and their offspring.
Poetry that is slowly unfolding as we traverse the braided currents. The visual layout offers shifting movement as we move amidst silence, the double spacing, the single spacing, the space to ponder, the spare and the dense, the jungle and the family room, the familiar and the unfamiliar.
Poetry as mapping. Maps are a recurring motif on an island that has a chequered history of cartography and naming, where orienteering is a key lesson for the military trainees. Yet I find myself viewing this as more than jungle mapping, because these poetic braids are a way of mapping self, of heart. There are the slippery currents of losing and finding one’s way in both past and present, the porous areas between here and there. There is no translation for a dish, kueh: ‘Neither cake nor jelly / Neither dumpling nor pudding / But somewhere between them all’. For me that signalled the inhabited space. Nothing set in concrete. Nothing static. The forever changed. Like the braided river flowing, the same but different.
This is poetry that navigates a tough experience, the poet’s military cadet years, those jungle ghosts, where spirits may dwell in trees: ‘The island didn’t seem like a place for people’. Where it’s the ‘Endless trees running deep into the red clay earth’. And it’s the weight of packs and mysterious stories and escape longings. The hammering weapons. Heart wrenching. This ache.
And then.
This is poetry that draws forward the father, there in his invalid wheelchair or his study, notebooks piling, books on shelves. The difficulty and ease of being with him, then and now. And the family, the mother, the siblings and the offspring, coming into view. And a scene, this together family scene, after the ‘archetypal family feast’, that is a catch in my throat, as the dreams accrue and connect:
Piecing our dreams together
In a wild mosaic
A basin
For other dreams
And in this haunting braid of life and death and loss and challenge, the death of a beloved cat, Giilgamesh, much caressed, sorely missed.
I am deeply drawn into this collection, drawn and redrawn, as hold my breath and wait, just for this moment, here with the expanse of autumnal blue sky, the kererū now calm, after weeks of drunken frenzy, this red clay lining the tongue speaking, an aftertaste in my coffee. And yes this collection has stuck to my skin (see below). I loved hearing Gregory read (again see below) – actually I would love to listen to a whole audio book. This gift. This poetry gift. Thank you.
Satellite view of the island
The jungle canopy a green so dark it’s almost black
It looks like a giant black square in the sea
The giant black square is a photo
Of us
Attired strangely
Walking on a soft dirt road at night
We look like we have walked a very long way
We look like we don’t know
where we have come from at all
a reading
Gregory reads from Clay Eaters
a conversation
Were there any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges as you wrote thiscollection?
The entire thing was a surprise, really, and a journey of discovery. When I started writing it, I had no idea where it would go.
It all started with the island. That’s where I started digging, again.
It’s humbling to return to the site of such trauma. Often it’s embarrassing to me. But I tried to treat my past selves and memories with as much kindness and acceptance as I could muster, and that in and of itself constituted a large part of the process.
I also learnt lots of things about the island’s history that I hadn’t known when I was there. That was very humbling.
What matters when you are writing a poem? Or to rephrase, what do you wantyour poetry to do?
That’s a difficult thing for me to generalise. I think each poem has its own tendencies, and my role is to follow them, tease them out. The writing leads me, instead of me leading it, if that makes sense. To me it feels more like a form of stewardship or collaboration, like tending to a garden.
As far as what I want the poems to “do”, I want them to stick to the skin, perhaps without the reader fully realising it. Also, even though my work tends to be very personal, I want readers to see themselves in it too, to catch glimpses of themselves in the gaps.
Are there particular poets that have sustained you, as you navigate poetry as both reader and writer?
Raul Zurita, Susan Howe, Myung-mi Kim, Tusiata Avia, Hera Lindsay Bird, Anne Carson, just to name a few!
We are living in hazardous and ruinous times. Can you name three things thatgive you joy and hope?
Love, food, and the idea that change is not just possible but certain.
Gregory Kan is a writer and developer based in Pōneke/Wellington. His first collection of poetry, This Paper Boat, was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for poetry in 2017. Under Glass, his second collection, was longlisted for the award in 2020. He was the 2017 Grimshaw Sargeson Fellow.
Lines composed less than a mile from the nearest Kum & Go
Two months have passed & each time I see that suggestive sign I think of impermanence, as well as faceless figures emerging from the shadows to entertain the kind of desire that makes thrillseekers of us all before disappearing & taking on a new form. & so I find myself buying a souvenir at a gas station just to remind me of my need to hold on to every place that offers up somewhere soft to land or a breeze to carry my breath back to those I’ve missed. Seasons, lovers or inspiration—come what may, there is a reckoning with what the tides deposit on the shores of our dreams for us to collect like trinkets. Once, a pearl got caught in my throat & all I could sing were songs about never seeing the cordial coastlines of home again. I left the doors to the past and the future unlocked in the hope that I would be visited by songs yet to be written. You see, I’ve been on Wellington time this whole time, so I know how this part of the story ends & what will greet me when I step across the threshold. Beauty can take the form of the memories & secrets passing through a petrol-stained concrete forecourt, lives lived through seasons that test the roles they’re meant to play. Lovers & enemies alike grasp at the plausibility of fate to decide whether or not to| pay mind to the return of the Machiavellian mastermind, who doesn’t need shadows to trick or treat. We know that there’s more than two colours that can dictate whether we stay still or take a chance on change, more than two ways of looking at the same cloud in an ever-shifting sky. We all feel this in our blood. I’ve drawn a line between fluorescent lighting & photoperiodism to settle the ellipsis, so that I may swallow the pearl & sing of my own homecoming without forgetting where I’ve been or the landscapes that held my absence
Iowa City, November 2024
Chris Tse
Chris Tse is the New Zealand Poet Laureate for 2022-25. He is the author of three collections published by Auckland University Press, and co-editor of Out Here, an anthology of Takatāpui and queer writers from Aotearoa. Chris is a former editor of The Spinoff’s Friday Poem and has guest edited issues of Best New Zealand Poems, Starling, and Cordite Poetry Review. In 2024, he participated in the International Writing Program Fall Residency at the University of Iowa.
NZ Poetry Shelf 