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Poetry Shelf 2025

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growing aubergine for the first time

Inside the city a house
Inside the house a room
Inside the room a cupboard
Inside the cupboard a drawer
Inside the drawer a box
Inside the box a necklace
Inside the necklace a story
Inside the story a city hope

Some years I invite you to share your favourite reads of the year, especially poetry, especially when poetry doesn’t get much attention in the end-of-year lists and book stacks that we are seeing across all forms of media. This year has sizzled and simmered and shone with local poetry: new collections along with live performances. So many collections document and explore tough stuff: illness, heartbreak, despair, suicidal thoughts, global wars and inhumanity, our government inflicting more and more damage on planet and people. And so many collections deliver love, a multi-stranded love and love in what words can do, whether exuberant or sweetly nuanced.

Every poetry book I have picked up, lingered over and reviewed (put review in the side bar and you will discover my reviews), I have utterly loved. Sadly for me, there is still a stack of books on my desk I’m itching to get to (see photos below), books by poets I love, books by poets new to me. This week I made the hard decision to return to reviewing these books after Poetry Shelf and I have rebooted, after we all get through the busy season where it is hard to read more than shopping lists.

I want to share a couple of highlights with you, but first a wee update. I am standing at a fairytale door, a threshold onto my new road. What specialists call my new normal, not the normal I enjoyed when I was travelling all over the country, visiting schools, doing events and author tours, reading and writing all day long. I have had a bone marrow transplant that has gifted me the miracle of life, thanks to an anonymous donor and an incredible medical team, but it comes with scars. Looks like I will always have to use my energy jar carefully, to manage my daily physical challenges with various aids. But I sure in heck find enjoyment and delight in every day.

Poetry Shelf has made such a difference in year that I have tagged both my worst and best. So many poets contributing, so many poetry fans reading and sharing. So many thoughtful caring emails, especially those responding to The Venetian Blind Poems, especially those responding to features and audio that have resonated with you. Poetry Shelf is nothing without you, without readers and writers connecting across generations, cultures, the length and the breadth of the country.

Creating three new series this year has been a special highlight for me. I have included links to one of them, Poetry Cafe Readings, because hearing these poets read has been such a gift. This will be back next year, along with the Speaking Out ( check out the Gaza poems) and Playing Favourites series (check out Jackson McCarthy), plus some new ideas. I have also included a link to the fabulous Te Whāriki anthology where some of the contributors selected a favourite poetry book of 2025.

Feature on Te Whāriki: Reading Ten New Poets from Aoteatoa, edited by Anna Jackson, Dougal McNeill and Robert Sullivan (Auckland University Press, 2025)

Poetry Shelf Cafe readings: Poets read and talk poetry for around twenty minutes

Richard von Sturmer reading
Jo McNeice reading
Anne Kennedy reading
Aruna Joy Bhakta reading
Harry Ricketts reading
Alexandra Cherian reading
Ethan Christensen reading
Sue Wootton reading

I often ask poets in interviews what words matter to them as they write – but today I am asking you what words matter as you live each day. I am thinking: kindness, self-care, connections, hope and joy. Over the next month or so I am going to read novels, watch movies, listen to music, tend the vegetable garden, and bake and cook.

Sending aroha to you all along with a huge bouquet of sweet and salty Te Henga ocean air.

Books on my must-read pile:

Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Jackson McCarthy

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Uniform

Louis and I had this theory that nobody knew
we were fucking. Uniforms could do that to a bloke —
help him blend in with a crowd. Only once, at a party,
did I ever see him without the shirt, collared and blue,
the high socks and striped scarf. All day at school,
stuffed and starved, I wanted to get them off him
as a way of loving him in them. Later, those first
February afternoons, our uniforms wilted in his room.

Nobody knew. But surely we inspired envy, our moody
solitudes and companies — a chance hand on his chest,
over the school crest — or our shining morning faces
in the supermarket, shimmering back to us in the glass
jars of olives. Behind us, watching, was Jackson McCarthy,
noted homosexual. Eater of olives. Writer of poetry.

Jackson McCarthy

I read this poem first at a Starling launch party in August last year, and people really seemed to like it. It’s one thing when a poem ticks all your own personal checkboxes: desire, love, Death, time, boys, mysteries, the night, vision, dreams, happiness, the dark furniture of the radio, Arcadia, blue jeans, blond hair, the vantage point of language where words sound before they mean, the city, parties, Louis, inexplicable sorrow, the past, beauty, mirrors, consent, solitude, virginity, and you. But it’s another when a crowd of real-life people click with it, too.

I think of ‘Uniform’ as an Italian sonnet (or at least in its typographical layout it appears to be) — but then it gives us a sudden English turn at the end. And I think this formal arrangement is mimetic of the tricks the poem’s playing on its readers about author, speaker, and confession: you start the poem thinking it’s one thing, but finish realising it’s another. I was writing a number of free-verse sonnets at the time, which I felt a little guilty about: it’s like sonneteering on easy mode. But you need some sort of formal scheme, no matter how defanged, to give you resistance; something to write into. I found even the most basic measurement of the sonnet — the terminal volta at the thirteenth and fourteenth lines — to be extremely productive for a while. You do twelve lines, then you do a twirl.

I would like to think this poem has a bit of nice sound patterning, including that delicious internal rhyme in the eighth line that to my shock and horror sounds clearer, I think, than the rhyme between lines thirteen and fourteen. Well, I guess I honestly have no clue what I’m doing — but then again, I do trust my own taste, my only gift. You can’t decide in advance or preempt what mode of work will become available to you, but you can shape it with your good judgement. If I get stuck I go for a walk and think of beautiful things: boys’ faces, the music of Poulenc, my parents, the water, my life.

‘Uniform’ was first published in The Spinoff’s Friday Poem column; I’m grateful to Hera Lindsay Bird for choosing it.

Jackson McCarthy is a poet and musician from Auckland currently studying in Wellington. He is of mixed Māori and Lebanese descent. His work has been published in Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Landfall, Starling, The Spinoff, and elsewhere, and he currently serves as an editor at Symposia. You can read more of his work here.

Poetry Shelf’s cafe reading for NZ Poetry Day plus breaking news

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Later in the year I want to launch a series of Poetry Shelf Live events around the country because I want to get back out in the world, and work offline as much as I do online. In the meantime, assembling poetry readings on Poetry Shelf gives us all a chance to hear poetry off the page. I will be doing more of this over the coming months!

To celebrate National Poetry Day, I offer you a suite of nine readings, not quite the same as being in a cafe or bookshop and getting a live poetry experience, but hearing poets read is such a heart-nourishing treat.

Poetry Shelf offers heartfelt congratulations to our new National Poet Laureate, Robert Sullivan. Robert is a terrific choice. His debut collection Star Waka (1999) was a groundbreaking arrival and the subsequent collections have added extraordinary threads, light and aroha to our poetry kete. Robert is also an anthologist, editor, festival participant in Aotearoa and overseas, currently President of the New Zealand Poetry Society / Te Rōpū Toikupu o Aotearoa and is Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Massey University Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa. He belongs to Ngāpuhi Nui Tonu (Ngāti Hau, and Ngāti Manu), and Kai Tahu (Kāti Huirapa ki Puketeraki), with affiliations to Ngāti Raukawa, and Ngāi Tai, and is also of Irish, Scottish and English descent. He lives in Oāmaru on the coastline known as Te Tai o Āraiteuru.

This news is the poetry cream on our national poetry celebrations.

Happy Poetry Day to poetry readers and writers across Aotearoa!

The National Poetry Day page with event schedule.

The readings

Hana Pera Aoake

excerpts from Some Helpful Models of Grief (Compound Press, 2025)

Xiaole Zhan

‘{Untitled}’ and ‘Learning the character for soul (靈)
contains the character for rain (雨)’

Jackson McCarthy

Three Southern Songs: ‘Punatapu’ ‘Arrowtown’, ‘Kawarau’. Then ‘Happiness’, ‘Song’

Sophie van Waardenberg

‘Self-Portrait as Adolescent Covered in Flour’, ‘Hymn to the Insomniac in Fool’s Spring’ from No Good (Auckland University Press, 2025)

Nadezhda Macey

‘Uranga’, ‘Syntax’ (from Starling Issue 18), ‘Victoria Park’, ‘Capsicum is a New Zealand Word?’

Josiah Morgan

three untitled poems from ‘act three’, in i’m still growing, Dead Bird Books, 2025

Erik Kennedy

‘Individualistic Societies’, ‘Notes Towards a Theory of Fun’ and ‘We’ve All Been There’ from Sick Power Trip, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025

Grace Yee

‘with two black dates for sweetness’ and ‘my father was not a gardener’ from Joss: a History, Giramondo Poetry, 2025

Anne Kennedy

‘The Black Drop: My History of Ugly’, from The Sea Walks into a Wall (AUP, 2021)

The poets

Hana Pera Aoake (Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāti Hinerangi, Tainui/Waikato) is an artist, writer, and sweaty milf from Aotearoa. Hana’s first book, a bathful of kawakawa and hot water, was published with Compound Press in 2020. Their second book, Blame it on the rain was published in 2025 with no more poetry (Australia). They just released a third book, Some helpful models of grief with compound press and are also publishing a fourth book of essays, On how to be with Discipline (Australia) in 2026.  Hana is edging through a PhD at Auckland University of Technology.

Xiaole Zhan (詹小乐) is a Chinese-Aotearoa writer and composer based in Naarm. Their work features in Auckland University Press’s New Poets 11. They are a 2025 Creative New Zealand Fellowship recipient, a 2025 Red Room Poetry Varuna Fellowship recipient, the 2024 Kat Muscat Fellow, as well as the winner of the 2023 Kill Your Darlings Non-Fiction Prize. Their name in Chinese means ‘Little Happy’, but can also be read as ‘Little Music’.

Jackson McCarthy is a poet and musician from Auckland currently studying in Wellington. He is of mixed Māori, Lebanese, and Pākehā descent. His work has been published in Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Landfall, Starling, The Spinoff, and elsewhere, and he serves as an editor at Symposia. You can read more of his work at https://linktr.ee/jacksonmccarthy. 

Sophie van Waardenberg is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. Her work can be found in Cordite, Starling, Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, Takahē and elsewhere. Her debut poetry collection is No Good (AUP, 2025). 

Nadezhda Macey (she/her) is a student of English Literature and French at Te Herenga Waka. She is also a poet and artist, you can find more @nadezhda.4rt, and in magazines starting with ‘S’: Starling, Salient, and Symposia.

Josiah Morgan (Kāi Tahu, Ngāti Maniapoto) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Ōtautahi. His latest book i’m still growing is out with Dead Bird Books now in all good bookstores. His other books were all released in the United States, including his hybrid text The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was performed as a six-hour-long performance artwork in Auckland Pride 2024. He believes in magic and the power of words to transform. He is currently working on a chapbook called Black Window, a new full-length book, and a theatrical adaptation of Faust in collaboration with Hagley Theatre School.

Erik Kennedy is the author of the poetry collections Sick Power Trip (2025), Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022), and There’s No Place Like the Internet in Springtime (2018), all with Te Herenga Waka University Press, and he co-edited No Other Place to Stand, a book of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). He lives in Ōtautahi Christchurch.

Grace Yee is the author of Chinese Fish (Giramondo), which won the Victorian Prize for Literature in Australia, and the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Chinese Fish will be published by Akoya in the UK in 2026. Her second book Joss: A History (also Giramondo) was released in June 2025. She lives in Melbourne, on Wurundjeri Land. 

Anne Kennedy is a Tāmaki Makaurau poet, novelist and teacher. Awards include the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry, the NZ Post Book Award for Poetry. Recent books are The Sea Walks into a Wall, The Ice Shelf and, as editor, Remember Me: Poems to Learn by Heart from Aotearoa New Zealand. Anne is the current editor of AUP’s New Poets series.