Dance Floor Romance, Chris Tse, AUP, 2026 The Things We Never Say, Elizabeth Strout, Random House, 2026
My Labour Day plans to have a café phone catch up with Anna, assemble blogs for the week, and watch a few things, flew out the window when our area lost broadband for most of the day! My family was away at a wedding so I found myself doing something I have never done before – moving between two books: a poetry book, Chris Tse’s Dance Floor Romance and a novel, Elizabeth Strout’s The Things We Never Say, shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize. I couldn’t have made a better choice. These electrifying reads make mind-enhancing partners.
I will be posting a review conversation with Chris to celebrate his stunning book over the coming weeks but in the meantime check out ‘Search history’, a poem from the new collection, I managed to post early yesterday! It got so much love.
Let me share a few thoughts on the most incredible novel I have read in ages. I wanted to weep and sing and dance as I read. I am full of ice chill and I’m full of human warmth. The book is a symphony of wisdom and humanity and is, in my view, written by a woman with her finger on the pulse of the world.
I don’t want to spoil it for you by giving away the folds and surprises but I do want to say that this book reminds me to listen to the person next to me, to their ills and woes and loves, to listen to myself, to my ills and woes and loves, to remind myself what is good for our students, our families, our friends, our planet. And I am reminded — especially in the light of my multiple degrees in Italian — of how an insidious and evil leader can hijack a nation but how some people maintain vital forms of resistance.
I am reminded of the gaps in our knowledge – how important it is to connect with history, whether that of the world or of our kin – of how we need the stories of parents and grandparents and beyond. I mourn the gaps in understanding who and how my mother and father were.
The protagonist, Artie Dam, is one of my all time wow expand-my mind-and-heart characters – a history teacher, a father, husband, friend, a mesh of complications as we all are . . . a meeting ground of jagged edges and healing grace. The tears are welling again as I write these lines.
I love this book so much. I love that it speaks not preaches, that it shows the simple within the complicated, the complicated within the simple. I have placed it on the table for my family to read because this book is a gift of hope. It is a gift of connection and listening and upholding ways to do good and yes it furnished the best Labour Day I have had in years.
the burden of the un/known? Water tells the story of time
& the weather makes a space for fear to curve
between selfish joys. There is never a question
too bright for the mouth of the cave.
Ask your parents how many times they returned
to ground zero as a way to unearth belief in themselves.
Once upon a time there was a sky for every hopeful glance.
Decades have passed; the world is still too much for safekeeping.
Chris Tse from Dance-Floor Romance (Auckland University Press, 2026)
Chris Tse is a poet and editor based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington. He is the author of How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (winner of the 2016 Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry); HE’S SO MASC; Super Model Minority (a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and longlisted at the 2023 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards); and Dance Floor Romance. He and Emma Barnes edited Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa. In 2022, Chris was named New Zealand’s 13th Poet Laureate; he completed his term in August 2025.
All the world’s a stage, & all the poets have main character energy
Man taught a machine to write poetry with the bones of bards past. Man forgot to tell the machine how to worship the moon & let the intrusive thoughts win. The machine will never understand how poetry is gathered in the tight corners of poets’ obsessions— or how being a poet is accepting the role of brazen leader of the lovesick, keeping their congregation fed & watered until the next Lorde album drops. A machine will never understand the unbreakable bond between main character energy & seasonal affective disorder. A machine is a poor substitute for poets who wield white space as a placeholder for catharsis. You know their kind. The lost-in- their-own-world poets who imagine every walk to the dairy as a musical number. The vengeful metaphor poets who get their driver’s licence just to casually cruise past an ex’s house with a kauri trunk hitched to their car. The chaotic good poets who reject social mores by leaking a group chat line by line as a thought experiment— their hypothesis being: poetry is just gossip with line breaks. Man trained a machine to analyse the entirety of human creativity & surmised that the point of poetry is sacred self-expression. But we all know it’s not that deep. Spoiler alert: it’s doing shots at karaoke during a transcendental rendition of ‘You’re So Vain’. This is our way of dealing with the world constantly falling apart & knowing that our coping mechanism options are limited. Be a sonnet. Be a loop. Be entered. Be exited. Be ceremony. Be colloquial. Be a monologue played for praise. Be audacious enough to break the fourth wall. Life is a sitcom & you are the star; everyone else is the studio audience lapping up each punchline & plot twist. In this poem, you can piss on the machine & it will tell you it’s raining. Poor, wet machine. Looking without seeking. History without experience. Voice without conviction.
Chris Tse
Chris Tse is the author of three poetry collections published by Auckland University Press and co-editor of Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa. He was New Zealand’s Poet Laureate from 2022-25. His fourth collection of poetry, Dance-Floor Romance, will be published by Auckland University Press in September 2026.
He is a man carved from witness wood and tonight they will cut him open.
Whispers ate his tongue and people failed to ask after him.
As they tear at his flesh to let in borrowed light his body splinters and edges its way under their nails.
No men with warmth in their fingers or an inkling of privacy, no women with a shred of public sympathy.
They fling his body open. They dismantle him with effortless crime.
Behold the human mess inside cue a surgeon’s wail. Blood-and-bone strokes warped beyond recognition.
What ages he has lived through what ruinous tides have claimed him not unlike the waters that claimed the SS Ventnor.
And having cast off the grain of his years into hallowed seas he traded fear for a nightmare of snakes.
Inside he could be dancing his feet as light as music. Inside he could be snow.
Extraction after extraction there is no consensus on who will keep his soul, who will keep his bones.
When their cruel exercise is over when they have retrieved what they never needed
what remains is a man of a thousand regrets. The insects bury themselves in his swollen dark.
Chris Tse Published in How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (AUP, 2014).
It’s around this time 20 years ago that I was putting the final touches on my thesis for the MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. My thesis was split into three sections, one of which contained the earliest versions of poems that would eventually become my first book, How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes. Some of these poems made it into the final version of the collection untouched, but that first go at telling the story of Joe Kum Yung only scratched the surface of the themes I’d ultimately explore.
‘(Biopsy)’ wasn’t written during that period – it came along much later and was prompted by an unlikely source: the television series Desperate Housewives. In episode two of season seven, Bree Van de Kamp’s contractor and love interest Keith Watson shows her some timber that he wants to use as panelling for her study. “Feel it,” he instructs her. “You know what they call this? Witness wood, ’cause it’s seen so much history.” I’d never heard the term ‘witness wood’ before; later I learned that it specifically refers to salvaged and repurposed wood from structures that were present during significant events. You never know when you’ll see or hear something that’ll give you the start of a new poem. I certainly didn’t expect that watching the melodrama and sexual tension unfold on Wisteria Lane would also give me the start of one of Snakes’ key poems.
Having spent some time revisiting my first book over the past couple of years, to mark its 10th anniversary and to prepare for the audiobook recording, I see the beginnings of themes and concerns that continue to pop up in my later work. ‘(Biopsy)’ is one of my first attempts at untangling the complications of writing about history and the power imbalance that goes with it. In some ways ‘(Biopsy)’ is a small meta moment in the collection that comments on the writing of the book itself and the use of Joe Kum Yung as a source of trauma to drive the narrative forward. Lionel Terry used Joe Kum Yung to make a point about ‘the Yellow Peril’ – as writers, how do we navigate our own biases and motivations when it comes to writing about other people and historical events, even if we’re doing so with the best intentions?
Chris Tse
Chris Tse is a poet and editor based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara | Wellington. He is the author of three poetry collections published by Auckland University Press: How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes, HE’S SO MASC, and Super Model Minority. He and Emma Barnes edited Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa. In 2022, Chris was named New Zealand’s 13th Poet Laureate and completed his term in August 2025. He was a 2024 fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program Fall Residency and a 2025 Nederlands Letterenfonds writer in residence.
Today Chris Tse is stepping down from his role as National Poet Laureate, and it felt extremely fitting to acknowledge his vital contribution to poetry in Aotearoa and overseas. He has staged a range of poetry events around the country, drawing in voices, inspiring younger writers, contributing to inspiring poetry conversations in various settings.
Having always been a big fan of Chris’s poetry — from his debut in AUP New Poets 4 (AUP 2011) to Super Model Minority (AUP, 2022) — I decided I would pick one poem from each of his books as a celebration of his tenure. Chris kindly answered a couple of questions from me and contributed a recent poem. To reread my way through his collections was utterly moving: from How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (2014, AUP), a collection that returns to the tragedy of murdered goldminer, Joe Kum Yung, to his next two, he’s so MASC (AUP, 2018) and Super Model Minority (AUP, 2022). His books navigate sexuality and race, sky and mountain peaks, revolution and imagining, speech and peace. Ah, take the time and spend a long weekend absorbing his extraordinary poetic ink.
Thank you, Chris thank you.
five poems
Dig after Seamus Heaney
Our first back yard hugged the prickled slopes of Kelson.
I watched my father dig and tear his way through bush and clay to find that richer soil.
That spicy scent of gorse, the path he zigzagged.
And beyond him, decades and oceans away, his father stooping to dig gathering ginger and spring onion; dreams of richer days.
•
Between my finger and my thumb the sticks rest.
•
Below the surface lies a history of chopsticks. In the days of new sight we clung to comfort as a sign of success.
Eight treasure soups, the finest teas ivory and bone over wood and plastic.
•
I’ll dig with them.
from Sing Joe, in AUP New Poets 4, Auckland University Press, 2011
•
They peer through me as if I were dead. My hands are tired now, fading to mist.
•••
I’ve held out for luck and fortune like a stony fool,
•••
but sometimes the heart must gracefully accept defeat.
•••
These days it feels like I am digging my own grave.
from How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes, AUP, 2014
Heavy Lifting
Once, I climbed a tree too tall for climbing and threw my voice out into the world. I screamed. I hollered. I snapped innocent branches. I took the view as a vivid but painful truth gifted to me, but did not think to lay down my own sight in recompense. All I wanted was someone to say they could hear me, but he tree said that in order to be heard I must first let silence do the heavy lifting and clear my mind of any questions and anxieties such as contemplating whether I am the favourite son. If I am not, I am open to being a favourite uncle or an ex-lover whose hands still cover the former half’s eyes. I’ll probably never have children of my own to disappoint so I’ll settle for being famous instead with my mouth forced open on TV like a Venus fly-trap lip-synching for its life. The first and last of everything are always connected by the dotted line of choice. If there is an order to such things, then surely I should resist it.
from he’s so MASC, AUP 2018
Wish list—Permadeath
I wish I didn’t feel compelled to write about racism, but there it is patrolling my everyday thoughts like a mall cop drunk with power.
I wish people didn’t ask me how to solve a problem like racism, as if it is a cloud they cannot pin down. I am not an expert spokesman
holding an elusive truth. I wish I could predict when racism would exit stage right to wherever bad things go to die rusty
non-biodegradable deaths, but I can’t predict the death of something with a robust business continuity plan that involves moving from
host body to host body. I am not an exorcist—I am a sympathetic vomiter. Is it predictable for me to write this poem? I suppose so.
What I really want to write about are things with promise, to offer up whiskers on kittens when the outlook is for Nazis on Nazis. I wish
I could sing my way out of this while the man I love applauds from the front row, our adorable Jack Russell terrier Rocket sat by his feet.
I wish I could start a love poem with a line like ‘He thumbs me like the Oxford Dictionary‘ and consider it a job well done. I wish
I didn’t always feel this way—always tired of explaining why I am tired and why writing this poem is more need that want.
I never felt the need to be the gunshot during a knife fight until they told me there was no such thing as ‘let’s finish this once and for all’
from Super Model Minority, AUP, 2022
How to edit a poem
Let the poem approach you first. Don’t point; don’t scare it.
Encircle the poem with broken lines and half-hearted rhymes to reverse any spell that may cause the reader sorrow.
Ask yourself: is the poem merely camouflage for the poet’s desires?
All persons, real or imagined, are questions and aphorisms double-crossing each other in pursuit of a revelation.
Inside this poem there are two poets: one is literal and the other is metaphorical.
Ask yourself: is the poet a secret carried in a whale’s mouth?
Capitalise every word that reminds you of your childhood.
Strike out every verb that will make the reader feel guilty for not living a wholesome and virtuous life.
Inside this poem there are two poets: one tells the truth and theother got away with it.
Ask yourself: when did you last trust a poem?
Interrogate each line as if it were a co-ordinate plucked from a map.
A crooked staircase halfway to the moon. A wolf cries in the dark.
The margins seesaw as you pull yourself into the poem for a better view, to take it all in.
(There is no way out.)
Use the poem as a mirror.
Use the mirror as a sucker punch.
Attack the mirror with a mallet.
Hide the broken shards in the feathers of birds and instruct them to land on rooftops when the night is at its softest.
The townsfolk’s sleep is disturbed by the crackle of crystal rain.
Record their reactions.
Respond, respond, respond.
from Everything I Know About Books: An insider look at publishing in Aotearoa, edited by Odessa Owens and Theresa Crewdson (Whitireia Publishing, 2023)
three questions
What draws you into a poem, whether as writer or reader?
As a reader, I want to get a sense that the poet is writing from a place of curiosity and isn’t afraid to let the reader get a glimpse behind the curtain as they work through their thinking or daydreaming. I don’t necessarily need anything to be resolved – an open end is just as good as any. I try to apply this to my own work as well because a big part of my writing process is to seek understanding about myself or the world. The poem is the result of that exploration.
Have you discovered any poets new to you in the course of your physical or reading travels over past couple of years?
So many! Editing Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems 2023 was a voyage of discovery of new-to-me poets, like John Allison, Isla Huia, Geena Slow and Marjorie Woodfield. This week I’ve been dipping in and out of the 2025 edition of Aotearoa Poetry Yearbook and there are lots of unfamiliar names, so I can’t wait to get to know these poets’ work. I’ve also had the good fortune of working or performing with poets from other countries, either online or in person. Some of the poets whose work I’ve really enjoyed are Hasib Hourani and Panda Wong from Australia, Péter Závada from Hungary, and Amanda Chong from Singapore.
Can you share a couple of highlights from your tenure as Poet Laureate?
For National Poetry Day 2023, I invited students from Te Whanganui a Tara for a day of poetry workshops and activities at the National Library. The poems that the students wrote that day were great and demonstrated how fearless and creative young minds can be. Another highlight was the Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, where I appeared in an event with Poets Laureates from around the world. It was a really special performance bringing poetry and dance together. I was very proud to be able to represent Aotearoa on stage that night alongside some poetry legends.
National Poet Laureate page Auckland University Press page
The Venetian Blind Poems, Paula Green, The Cuba Press, 2025
When I wrote Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry (MUP, 2019), I built a house, dividing the book into rooms, and then moving through open doors and windows to the wider world. The book was neither a formal history nor a theoretical overview of New Zealand’s women’s poetry but a way of collecting, building recouping valuing the poetic voices of women in Aotearoa. As I moved through the rooms in the house the themes accumulated: politics, poetics, love, the domestic, self, relations, illness, death, location, the maternal, home, voice.
The book came out in 2019, not that long ago, and I was interested to read ‘The sickbed’ chapter again. I began the chapter by saying inquisitive audiences often ask, ‘Why write poetry?’. I still claim the answers are myriad: it makes us feel good, we are addicted to wordplay, we can squeeze writing a poem in between domestic chores, parenting, scholarly endeavour, work commitments. We might crave public attention, awards, good reviews. We might simply have to write. Our poetry might reflect a love of music, storytelling, suspense, wit, surprise, attraction to the unsayable or beauty. We might write poems at the kitchen table, in our head as we walk, run, dream or dillydally. We might favour condensation and pocket size writing or expansion and long sequences. We might write from a sick bed.
My collection Slipstream (AUP, 2010) came out of my breast cancer experience. I refer to it in Wild Honey: ‘poetry was an energy boost, a way to enhance my sense of wellbeing’. As I wrote, at least a year after the experience, I did not feel I was writing poems – nothing on the page earned the label ‘poem’ in my view — but I was conscious that the white space, the juxtapositions, the assembled lists and the melody were reaching for the poetic. I did not want to summon the dark, middle of the night slumps, but rather to show illness can change the way you see the day as well as live the day.
The Venetian Blind Poems is a little different in that I wrote it in the moment, in hospital and then back home on the recovery road. But I recognised similar motivations to write.
My new collection has been out in the world for a fortnight now, and it feels so very special. To be in Motutapu Ward and the Day Stay Ward this week, signing copies for nurses, hearing them read fragments aloud, reminded me that poetry is an incredible way of connecting. I am still in a thicket of appointments as I fine tune the road ahead, but this fortnight feels like like my time in hospital, when so many poets sent me a poem in a card. The emails you have sent me these past two weeks, so thoughtful and caring, have shone fresh light on how and why poetry is a gift. On why we write and sometimes publish poetry. I will treasure your emails for a long time (and reply soon)!
More than anything, The Venetian Blind Poems is a way of saying thank you to the doctors and nurses who have given, and are giving so much. I offer an enormous bouquet of thanks to Mary McCallum and Paul Stewart at The Cuba Press, for the beautiful book, and for inviting such terrific responses to post on social media by poets who have read it.
Now its back to normal transmission! I have new ideas for Poetry Shelf bubbling like my sour dough starter, manuscripts to finish, a treasury of books to review, emails to answer, a few more appointments, and most excitingly, I am ready to get my secret seedling idea off the ground: Poetry Shelf Goes Live. Yes! Soon I will be back in the world organising live poetry events around the country.
A cluster of illness poems
The waiting game
begins with someone calling your name before you wait to have your blood taken in a windowless room. Wait for the stultifying thoughts of red and disease to pass. Wait for the phone call, for relief to wash over you. And while you are waiting I recommend you dance like the memory of sweat easing down his throat; roll open like the drum beat of your limbs in sync; tear through your wildest nights, still lit in hopeful neon; cry like the Christmas you lost your last grandparent; and sing like the forgotten violin slowly coming undone in your muscle memory. If you do not allow yourself to sleep in peace with your worries, you will find yourself awake at the bottom of a very deep, very secret lake.
Chris Tse Turbine, 2014
A Final Warning
I walked past the stars the silence of grandfathers
I was going somewhere but where
I went left at first then right then way off course then back to somewhere
near the middle did this mean I was ready to die
well they’ve been testing me for everything I think I’ve got the lot
Bill Manhire from Honk Honk, The Anchorstone Press, 2022
The Night Shift
I wake on the ward, afloat on ketamine, fentanyl, see sky-blue morphine swifts roost nearby in pleated paper thimbles
and some uneasy instinct tugs my gaze to a scuff mark on the lino floor. Coal-dark, it smolders. I stall.
A voice reassures me it’s just a graze left by the wheel of some routine machine: IV, PCA line, heart monitor screen.
Yet as I ease deep-cut core and leaden legs over the distant side of the high bed I can’t shake this need to stare
not quite in fear: not quite.
For last night, creatures came. They arrived en masse, nodded, swayed, pressed into each dimmed cubicle,
their copper eyes bright-candled, lips pouched over strong, proud teeth, their heads bowed in silent inspection;
marmalade lions with oxen feet, crested birds with antlers, candy-pink teats, all crowded, crowded round each bed
as the window in time was fast contracting, and they wanted us to see before our minds sealed tough with the fibers of logic, denial.
Their fur packed tight as green florets on catkins. Their horns, colossal black spikes, gleamed like grand pianos. Such mass and strength in their embedded weaponry,
yet still, they withheld their crush and maim.
The breath and bunt of their herded skulls said we are the unbroken in you, don’t be afraid, and I saw through the seep of dawn
that soon like guardians they will gather each one of us, our failing forms absorbed into their warm, strong-walled veins
until we too watch each figure on the bed as something invisible shifts in the intricate balance of matter and spirit.
So it is awe, not dread, that asks me to leave the ground undisturbed where they gathered, to skirt carefully the sign one left like a scorched hoof print as if they had stood in fire to show they bear time’s pyre for us,
our wild sentries, our wild sentries.
Emma Neale from Liar, Liar, Lick, Spit, Otago University Press, 2024
(A lifetime of sentences)
Soon, I could leave my body without prompts. The artist’s concept of the birth of a star, or I broke my name until the fibres separated and lost their coats. My thirst for windows kept me indoors. My gaze wandered across the suburbs of childhood, faces stammering with shyness, bodies masquerading as furniture. Initial mass and luminosity determine duration, but my sensibility comes to require an object. Here, the word “system” implies a level of certainty that is unwarranted. Some of those memories were not written by me, so they are memos, at home on my desk, but still authoritative. Now, instead of a pupil, there’s a screensaver. It was late. The room was empty. A lifetime of sentences which at first glance seem superfluous, but whose value is later understood. One thing leads to a mother. Soon enough, a flock of children came running and tapped on the glass. When I reached the bottom of the stares, I looked up.
Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle selected by Kiri Pianaha Wong and was published a fine line and also Best NZ Poems 2011
it is a wedding cavalcade in which I take your day of birth and marry it with ten pink tulips to mine look, behind us on the road sadness and unutterable joy leaping over the rocks how we were those people in the crowd unmindful of everything except stepping along together under our parasols what’s wrong with that? see, the road is still there still ahead and behind losing its mind and leaping over the rocks with its train of clowns who are careless careless careless and will never behave any differently believing themselves arm in arm with all they need to sustain life on a distant planet choogaloo, this is all you need tulips and a parasol to keep off the bigger bits of debris falling out of the sky don’t be sad there is every chance we are just now resident in two minds regarding each other tenderly, quizzically, uproariously as a wedding cavalcade
Michele Leggot from Milk & Honey, Auckland University Press, 2005
What’s the time, Mr Wolff-Parkinson-White?
Press palm against skin feel its breathless sprinting
count 230 beats in a minute count six sibling arguments count four gecko squawks
gulp two glasses of water phone the absent dad three times return to the couch
count 194 beats—and whoah with the flutter of a moth it slows down to a jog
steady rhythm of 75
Fire heart Sea heart Earth heart
Calm waters as a child now more fire than earth chased by a white wolf
Want to feed my child ruby corn raspberries red meat cherry tomatoes pomegranate bursts sugar and acid enough to woo a rebel
The heart heals itself between beats, reassures Elizabeth Smither
Mikaela Nyman
Amy Marguerite picked a poem from Shira Erlichman’s Odes to Lithium, a book I now have on order! But sadly I didn’t manage to get permission to post the poem but you can listen to Shira read it here.
Self-Affirming Mantra
I was searching my symptoms online. Disturbed sleep led to fatigue which led to post-viral condition and also to alcohol abuse and liver disease and unthinkable cancers which all led to conclusions about society and how one operates in it, how someone can be rational and maladaptive at the same time, how resilience is just a word in a PowerPoint, how years of work go into the manufacture of one unit of anxiety (a person), and how each unit, although similar to others in many ways, is unique, the product of a freakish and golden permutation of inputs, which led me back to my usual searches for wars and politicians and racing drivers and recipes and animals and islands and colours.
I went out into the day with my symptoms. The sun made the swans look like harps. I appreciated the silhouettes of buildings. I scrumped apples from over a fence. My symptoms were still with me but also not with me. I was loving them. I was setting them free.
Erik Kennedy from Poto | Short (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025)
Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate Chris Tse marks the end of his term in this exciting evening with fellow poets Ken Arkind, Cadence Chung, Gregory O’Brien, Chris Price, and Ruby Solly.
Reflections on the future
Join Chris at the National Library to mark the end of his time in the role with his reflections on the future of Aotearoa New Zealand poetry and readings from special guests.
Chris will be joined by poets Ken Arkind, Cadence Chung, Gregory O’Brien, Chris Price, and Ruby Solly.
I left the doors to the past and the future unlocked …
Chris Tse’s three-year term as Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate ends on Phantom Billstickers National Poetry Day, when the next Poet Laureate will be announced.
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 longlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2023.
Ken Arkind is an American poet, author, performer, and educator originating from Steamboat Springs in Colorado. He holds the 2006 title of the American National Poetry Slam Champion and the 2010 title of Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam Champion. Ken now resides in Auckland and is a recent graduate from the Manukau Institute of Technology’s Creative Arts Programme.
Cadence Chung (she/they) is a poet, student, and musician from Wellington, currently studying at the New Zealand School of Music. Her poems started being published in her junior years of high school, and her debut chapbook anomalia was published by We Are Babies Press in April 2022. Her writing takes inspiration from antique stores, Tumblr text posts, and dead poets.
Gregory O’Brien is a poet, painter, author, curator, and editor. His most recent poetry publication is a collection of poems and paintings, House and contents (2022). Other recent publications include a book-length meditation on the Pacific, Always song in the water (2019) and the Ockham award winning book Don Binney: Flight Path (2023).
Chris Price’s poetry collections include Husk (Jessie Mckay Best First Book of Poetry, 2002), The Blind Singer (2009) and Beside Herself (2016). She has also published Brief Lives (2006), an eccentric ‘biographical dictionary’ that samples the lives of both real and fictional characters. Her latest book is The Lobster’s Tale, a lyric essay in conversation with the photographs of Bruce Foster (2021). Chris is a former editor of Landfall, has been a Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow (2011) and in 2024 held a Bogliasco Fellowship in Italy. She convenes an MA workshop (Poetry and Creative Nonfiction) at the International Institute of Modern Letters.
Ruby Solly (Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe) is a writer, musician, taonga pūoro practitioner, and music therapist living in Pōneke on the old riwai plantation of her Kāti Māmoe ancestors. She has been published in journals such as Landfall, Sport, and Starling, as well as had poetry published in America and Antarctica as well as Aotearoa. Her first book Tōku Pāpā was published by Te Herenga Waka University Press in 2021.
The arrival of a new Chris Tse poetry collection is always a moment to celebrate.
Paula: In 2022 I am running a few email conversations with poets whose work has affected me over time. I have loved your poetry since your appearance in AUP New Poets 4 (2004). Your new book, Super Model Minority, strengthens my enduring relationship with your writing. The collection is an explosion inside me, but first I want to touch upon the spiky times we live in. What helps you? I am finding books keep repairing me, sending me on extraordinary package holidays, depositing me in the sky to drift and dream, to think. All genres. What are books doing for you at the moment?
Chris: Books have been such a comfort for me these past few years. Emma Barnes and I were still up to our necks in reading for Out Here when we went into lockdown in March 2020, so there was plenty to keep me busy and distracted. Things did get a bit more difficult when we couldn’t access some older and out-of-print books, but we made it work. I’m not a very fast reader so I do tend to take my time with several books on the go at any given time. Books have always made me happy – I was always happiest hunched over a book while my family watched rugby or played mahjong in the background. These days a big part of that happiness is the thrill I get seeing friends getting published and receiving well-earned praise for their amazing work. It’s such an exciting time to be a reader and a writer – to be able to experience the world through the poetry of essa may ranapiri and Rebecca Hawkes, or to have your brain recharged by the essays of Megan Dunn and Lana Lopesi. Aside from a few small projects I have no plans to start writing a new book, so I’m just hungry for stories and ideas right now to see where that might take me next. I want to read as much as I can for pleasure while I can.
Paula:Out Here gripped me on every human level imaginable, yet I never considered how Covid might prevent access to the archives. That was such a joy for me researching for Wild Honey. With Emma, you have gathered something special. Wide ranging and vital. It is how I feel about the younger generation of poets. I fall upon brittle, vulnerable, edgy, risky, exposed heart, potent – and I am grateful to Starling and The Spinoff’s Friday Poems for representing these wide-ranging voices. I am decades older than you, but how is the new generation affecting you?
Chris: For me, it’s such an exciting time to be a poetry reader right now with so many young poets producing ground-breaking and challenging work. Also, they’re voices and perspectives that we’ve been sorely lacking for such a long time – poets like Cadence Chung, Khadro Mohamed, Lily Holloway and Ruby Solly are all redefining what ‘New Zealand poetry’ means in their own ways. If I look back at what it was like to be a poet at their age, the playing field has shifted a lot because of journals like Starling and Stasis, and publishers like We Are Babies Press. I find their energy so infectious and inspiring – it certainly makes me want to keep pushing myself as a writer.
Paula: Exactly how I feel! But I also have poets I have carried across the decades since my debut collection in the 1990s. Bill Manhire, Michele Leggot, Bernadette Hall, Dinah Hawken, JC Sturm, Hone Tuwhare. Poets that helped me become a writer in so many ways. Particularly as I didn’t do any creative writing courses. Were there poets from the past or the present that were writing aides for you? In person or on paper?
Chris: My exposure to New Zealand poetry was sorely lacking as a high school student, so I’m really grateful that the papers and creative writing workshops I did at university introduced me to the canon and more contemporary writers. Jenny Bornholdt, Stephanie de Montalk, Bill Manhire and Alison Wong are poets whose work played a huge role in shaping my fumblings as a young poet. My poetry world was further expanded when I started to stumble across contemporary US poets like D.A. Powell, Frank Bidart, Cole Swensen and Richard Siken, whose first collection Crush I have written and spoken a lot about. It really is one of those life-changing books that set me on my current path. For Super Model Minority specifically, I turned to Chen Chen, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Tusiata Avia, Nina Mingya Powles and Sam Duckor-Jones for comfort and inspiration. Their work feels so vital during these times of change and uncertainty.
Super Model Minority, Chris Tse, Auckland University Press, 2022
Paula: Inspired and comforted seem crucial for both readers and writers. Your new collection is body shattering and heart repairing. And yes, both inspiring and of comfort. The book includes the best endorsements ever (Nina Mingya Powles, Helen Rickerby, Rose Lu). They catch how the reading experience affected me perfectly. Would you couch the writing experience in similar terms?
Chris: Writing this book caught me off-guard, in a number of ways. First, I didn’t think I’d have a manuscript ready so soon after HE’S SO MASC – I was happy to take my time with the next book. Then a few things happened that set off something in me – an urgency to write and respond: the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque attacks, and the rise of anti-Asian sentiment as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. These events all triggered powerful emotions, but the overriding frustration I felt was that things seem to stay the same no matter how much we push for societal change and equality. I was overcome by anger, sadness, and helplessness, so I decided to write myself out of that state and turn it into energy. The poems kept coming and I found myself confronting a lot that I’ve left unspoken for so long – some of it out of guilt, some of it out of fear. Overall, the writing process taught me a lot about myself because of these responses and the realisation that it’s important to hold on to hope throughout the dark times – I’m not as nihilistic as I thought I once was, even if that’s how it may come across in the book!
Paula: I am coming across a number of poets who are re-examining a drive to write poetry in a world that is overwhelming, disheartening. Gregory O’Brien muses on poetry expectations: ‘If the times are dark, oppressive, tunnel-like – as they seem presently – maybe poetry can be a lantern?’ For me it’s Covid and impinging greedy powers. Shattered everyday lives in Hong Kong, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine. And it’s like you say – despite waves of resistance, critique, standing up and speaking out – a world free of sexism, racism, poverty, classism, homophobia can feel impossible. And yet … poetry can be essential at an individual level. It seems so, for you and I, as both readers and writers.
I will use my tongue for good. I say I will because this book needs to start with the future even though the future has always scared me with its metallic fingernails poking through the metaphysical portal come-hithering. Aspiration—and the threat of what we have awakened from the salty ashes of a world gone mad— aspiration will bolster my stretch goals. I will use my tongue to taste utopia, and share its delights with my minority brothers and sisters before the unmarked vans arrive to usher me back in time.
from ‘Utopia? BIG MOOD!’
The first poem ‘Utopia? BIG MOOD!’ is an inspired entry to the book. The opening line gives me goose bumps. I want it tattooed on my skin. Heck just reading it make me want to cry, stand up and getting going. It implicates the writing of poetry in the world and the world in the writing of poetry. It gives me hope reading this. You say it all in the poem but do you carry utopia in your heart? Despite your sadness and anger and helplessness?
Chris: That’s such a lovely quote from Greg – it sums up exactly how I feel as a poet and when I’m reading submissions for the Friday Poem. I’ve definitely noticed that recently poets are using poetry to light the way, even if we’re not sure where a particular path is leading us. Better to walk in light than stumble in darkness I suppose. I’m so glad that the first line resonates for you in that way. Here’s the thing – the first lines of all three of my books are a thread that ties them together. (I won’t presume that anyone is reading my work that closely to spot it!) All three books open with a reference to speech or being heard. In Snakes, it’s “No one asked me to speak…”; in HE’S SO MASC I wanted the flipside so the first line is “Shut the fuck up”. I knew I wanted the first line in Super Model Minority to echo the first two books – “I will use my tongue for good” felt like the best way to open this book about confrontation and working towards a brighter future. So, to answer your question, I do carry some form of utopia in my heart because without it I’d be resigning myself to a future that is ruled by sadness and anger. If there’s a conclusion that I come to in the book, it’s that utopia will always be out of reach because we’ll never agree on a singular utopia – the version we carry in each of us is built upon our own desires and subjective perspectives of the world around us.
Paula: Ah it gives me hope to imagine our world no longer governed by despair and anger. I loved your review of Janet Charman’s new collection with Kathryn Ryan on RNZ National ((The Pistils, OUP). I haven’t read the book yet but I got the sense it was personal, intricate, political. The same words apply to your collection. Each poem opens up in the process of reading, and then lingers long after you put the book down. It feels so deeply personal. The way you reassess vital things: the past, the importance of names (your name), speaking more than one language, your parents, relationships, being gay. And in this personal exposure and self-navigation, there are the politics that feed and shape who you are. Inseparable. It feels like a landmark book to me. Is that placing too much on its shoulders?
Chris: It feels like a landmark book for me personally in terms how far I’ve come as a writer over the last decade. I look at my three books side by side and even though there are things I would change in the first two (and I’m sure I may have similar feelings about some of the poems in Super Model Minority in a few years!) I’m really proud of this body of work I’ve created. HE’S SO MASC has those early flourishes of the personal and the political, and I remember being so worried about how it would be received because it was so different in tone and outlook than Snakes. All of my books to date have required a lot of self-reflection and self-critique to get to a place where I’m not only comfortable writing about these topics, but also to be able to share them. Even though the work is personal I hope people can see themselves in it too, or can see why some of the things I write about are a big deal for me and the queer and POC communities.
Paula: Would you see yourself then as a hermit poet, a social poet where you share what you are writing along the way, or something in between?
Chris: I’ve got a small group of trusted writers who I send works in progress to if I’m stuck on something, but this time around I did hold a lot back until it was ready in manuscript form because I wanted to work on trusting my own instincts. However, when it comes to sending work out into the world for publication, I’d say I’m more on the social side, although there were a few poems from Super Model Minority that I chose not to submit anywhere because I felt like they needed to be read in the context of the collection as a whole.
Paula: Is there a poem (or two) that really hits the mark. Whatever that mark might be! That surprised you even.
when asked to explain the lines that lead to now, you describe /
the shape of your body as it hits water / the shape of cold water
shocking muscle / the shape of fleshy chambers forced to loosen
and acquiesce / the shape of your grandparents in their coffins /
the shape of coffins that are too small to contain entire lifetimes /
the soft and hard moments we can’t forget no matter how often we
turn our backs to the light / [you write this poem out of love / but
even love can be a blindfold] / the shape of you and your parents
standing in your grandparents’ driveway / after being kicked out
for talking to your aunty’s white boyfriend / your hand reaching
out to someone you don’t recognise in a dream /
from ‘Identikit’
Chris: I’m really proud of ‘Identikit’ in this collection – finishing that one felt like a fist-in-the-air moment. I think it’s because it covers a lot of historical and emotional terrain that I’ve wanted to write about but had struggled to find a way to balance the pain with moments of joy. Same with ‘Love theme for the end of the world’, which is the slightly more optimistic and hopeful sibling to ‘Identikit’. In fact, the way the “…for the end of the world” poems revealed themselves as I wrote them was surprising to me, because they felt like a valve had ruptured and all this pent up pressure was being spilled out onto the page.
Paula: I wrote down ‘a bath bomb effect’ in my notebook as I was reading. The whole book really. A slow release of effervescence. The kind of poetry that you think and feel. That inspires and comforts! This comes through when you perform or record your poetry. The poems you recorded from the book for Poetry Shelf. Your performances with the Show Ponies. Your readings have got a whole lot of love on the blog. Mesmerising! Does it affect the writing? The future performances in the air?
Chris: Sometimes I’ll have a feeling as I’m writing as to whether or not a poem will be one suited for performances. ‘The Magician’, ‘What’s fun until it gets weird?’ and ‘Poetry to make boys cry’ were written to be performed at particular events so I was conscious about how they flow and build during a performance. Having that embedded into the poem really helps me when it comes to performing it, and hopefully that effect comes across on the page when others are reading it. Reading my work out loud, either at home or to a crowd, has become a much more integral part of my writing and revision process in recent years, even if it isn’t necessarily a poem that I think will make it into high rotation as a ‘live’ poem. This wasn’t really a major consideration when I was writing Snakes because the thought of sharing my work in that way wasn’t really front of mind, although I do love the opportunities that book presents when I’m asked to do a long set and have the chance to read a substantial selection from it.
Paula: I agree that what you write must be a big deal for the queer and POC communities. I am heartened by an increased visibility of Asian writers not just as poets but as editors. But at times I am also disheartened. How do you feel?
Chris: It really is heartening to see so many POC and queer writers getting published and stepping into editing and leadership roles, but there’s still a long way to go to undo decades of erasure and disengagement with the industry, and to not feel like we exist only to be a tick in the diversity box. When it feels like we’re not getting anywhere, I hold on to as many moments of joy as I can and celebrate our achievements. I’ll never forget being on the bus home after the last event at Verb 2019 and being overwhelmed with emotion after spending the weekend attending events featuring so many Asian authors. It felt like such a turning point to have so many writers I could consider contemporaries, and to be graced by the presence of US poet Chen Chen, who has been a major inspiration. The other time I’ve had the same feeling was while rehearsing for a staged reading of Nathan Joe’s play Scenes from a Yellow Peril – the entire cast and crew were Asian. It’s the dual power of being seen and finding your people! When I started writing, the concept of ‘a Chinese New Zealand writer’ felt so murky and out of reach, and I also wasn’t even sure if it was a role I particularly wanted to inhabit. The word ‘whakama’ comes to mind when I think about who I was at that time, and it’s taken me literally decades to push back against that shame and unpack the effect of racism on my life to understand why I need to be loud and proud about who I am.
Paula: Your epigraphs signpost both past and future. This is important. Both in view of poetry and life. Like I have already said, many poets are examining the place and practice of poetry in our overwhelming and uncertain world. Are you writing poems? What do you hope for poetry, as either reader or writer, as editor of The Friday Poem?
Chris: It’s been wonderful seeing more people read and engage with poetry over the last few years both on the page or in person. I think a lot of this is a result of people not relying on old structures and established means of production, and just getting on with getting their work out there through new channels, or putting on innovative events and festivals and mixing poetry with other artforms. It’s proof that we can continue to challenge people’s perceptions of poetry and to find ways to introduce it into people’s everyday lives. But it’s more than just poetry being ‘cool’ again – a lot of work still needs to be done to address diversity, equity and accessibility. From my perspective as a writer, reader and editor, the future looks bright – and isn’t that what we want poetry to do? To show us the power of possibility and give us reasons to be hopeful.
I guess there’s always the pull of more to do—flags to fly and words to scratch into the world’s longest stretch of concrete.
I guess what I’m saying is—I am not done with snakes and wolves; I am not done with feathers or glitter on the roof of my mouth.
This is me begging for a fountain to taker all my wishes. This is me speaking a storm into my every day.
from ‘Wish list—Permadeath’
Chris Tse was born and raised in Lower Hutt. He studied English literature and film at Victoria University of Wellington, where he also completed an MA in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters. Tse was one of three poets featured in AUP New Poets 4 (2011), and his work has appeared in publications in New Zealand and overseas. His first collection How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (2014) won the Jessie Mackay Award for Best First Book of Poetry, and his second book HE’S SO MASC was published to critical acclaim in 2018. He is co-editor of AUP’s Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa, published in 2021.
Poetry Shelf: Chris Tse reads from Super Model Minority
Super Model Minority, Chris Tse, Auckland University Press, 2022
Chris reads ‘Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow’
Chris reads ‘BOY OH BOY OH BOY OH BOY’
Chris Tse is the author of three poetry collections published by Auckland University Press: How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes (winner of Best First Book of Poetry at the 2016 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards), HE’S SO MASC and Super Model Minority. He and Emma Barnes are the co-editors of Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa.
