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Poetry Shelf Weekend Reading Listening and an Invitation

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“Poetry probably isn’t necessary, strictly speaking. It doesn’t happen because somebody thought it financially viable or ethically responsible or somehow socially vital. But in the bombed cities, the wasted homes, the dishevelled places, poems are still being written; poems are still being written in Palestine. And so one of the reasons that artmaking remains radical is that its existence alone suggests, or even speaks into reality, however briefly, an alternative system of value. In this I’m something of an old-school progressive. Poetry goes on in the sense that it just happens — despite violence; motivated by nothing; needed, but less than shelter; heralded by no dollar, poets continue their work. Poetry also goes on in the sense that its aesthetic conception of value chafes with a world in extreme turmoil, ruled by monied interests, in which a genocide is unfolding on our phone screens; it figures by negation another, better world of no violence. For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives (Auden). And so we go on. In which direction? Ake, ake, ake; onwards.” Jackson McCarthy

For the past month I have spent time with Jackson McCarthy’s sublime debut poetry collection, Portrait (AUP, 2026). It is the kind of poetry experience that underlines why, no matter how rugged my road is, how depleted my energy jar is, poetry is both vital and connecting, so utterly nourishing. Our conversation sparked ideas for my blog, for my own writings. To hear Jackson read was a bonus.

This week a special event took place: the celebration and gifting of the tokotoko to Robert Sullivan Ngāpuhi (Ngāti Manu, Ngāti Hau / Ngāti Kaharau) and Kāi Tahu (Kāti Huirapa ki Puketeraki), our current Poet Laureate, at the National Library. The tokotoko, embued with mana, is carved by master artist carver, Jacob Scott, and specially created to fit the laureate. The event was sadly moved from Matahiwi marae in Hawke’s Bay, due to the storm, but was a moving and fitting ceremony that included karanga, singing, speeches and readings from around 18 poets. Since 2007, when the National Library took over the appointment of the Poet Laureate, the Laureates have been Michele Leggott, Cilla McQueen, Ian Wedde, Vincent O’Sullivan, CK Stead, Selina Tusitala Marsh, David Eggleton and Chris Tse.

Monday: Poetry Shelf Monday Poem – A sickle sun by Megan Kitching

Tuesday: Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites – Melinda Szymanik picks Erik Kennedy (she writes her own poem version!)

Wednesday: Poetry Shelf Breathing Room – Love by Jenny Powell

Thursday: Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Jenna Todd picks Michael Pederson (and his incredible ode to bookshops)

Friday: Poetry Shelf conversation and reading – Jackson McCarthy

An invitation: I invite you to choose a poetry book you love that has been published in Aotearoa in 2025 or 2026. Write a paragraph (or two) on why you love this (your choice what you write) and choose a poem that, with permission from the poet and publisher, I would include. paulajoygreen@gmail.com

My new post box: PO Box 58, Waitākere 0660.

Song

I was licking the moon like
a streetlamp before the water
razed the city — people, jobs,
lovers, I feel your movements
glowing and reckoning with me.
Some people say the loss I felt

with you was inevitable, a foregone
conclusion, but I can still breathe
the air around the dark
shape of your body.

The life I’ve felt has been
larger only than this tide;
tonight, messages from family reach
me, surreal, on my phone.

My cousins in Beirut can feel
the terror in the air, I go on
with so little left to speak; listen
to my heart, these songs
of loss I write while I
cannot hear the bombs.

Jackson McCarthy
from Portrait, AUP, 2026

Poetry Shelf conversation and reading: Jackson McCarthy

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Portrait, Jackson McCarthy
Auckland University Press, 2026

To celebrate Jackson McCarthy’s sublime debut collection, Portrait, Jackson and I embarked upon a conversation about poetry, and in particular his new book. The conversation is interspersed with readings from the collection.

Paula: Reading a new poetry collection so often widens and shifts what poetry can be and do. I find myself opening rather closing the pores of a poem, I find myself feeling thinking breathing intuiting listening. Not wanting to explain. Wanting to share how and why it clicks with me so very deeply.

That’s me as a reader — what verbs signal you as poet, writer of your debut collection?

Jackson: I like your verbs, Paula! I like “thinking” especially. There’s a lot of mental preparation that goes on before I sit down and write a poem. I write quite quickly; or, if a poem is taking too long, I drop it and come back to it later, sometimes weeks or months later. Each time I return, I touch things up quite fast and then let the changes settle. Often you can’t get a real sense for the picture until the paint dries. All the meanwhile, though, I’m thinking — as well as feeling, breathing, intuiting, listening — and so I consider that the main constitution of my practice: being alive. 

‘No art’

Paula: Yes! Being alive in the poem. Listening is key to me as both reader and writer of poetry. I am listening to your deft lyricism, every word-note pitch perfect: “We sit / in the quiet of waiting” (from ‘Mahuika as a boy’).  Like listening to the aural dexterity of ‘No art’. This is the first deep satisfaction, the lyricism of the line. How important is poetry as lyricism for you?

Jackson: Well, for me, it’s probably the essential thing. Poems are silent, fixed, complete on the page. Yet everything about poetic technique (metre, rhyme, enjambment, and so on) aspires to the status of voice. And so the poem lives a double life. It’s both something static on the page and something enacted in the process of reading; something that reveals itself to us line by line almost spontaneously, each time as if for the very first time. It’s both a typographic object and a verbal performance. So the poem mystifies or lives in the gap between stasis and process, and between (why not say it all?) the dead and the living.

If this is a limited view — which it is; I don’t know if I’ve properly accounted for visual poetry — it’s at least a generative constraint. I’m not in the business of giving definitions, saying what poetry is or isn’t. But if I were to say that painting consists in the application of paint to a surface, surely that definition, while limited, is wide enough to encompass many spectacular things. Those are some thoughts about lyricism and listening, and the relationship between silence and sound, which many types of poetry and surely some prose too can evoke. I’m grateful that you’ve spent time “listening” to my book in this way. Then there’s lyric, as a genre — and I do think of my poems as lyric poems, generically speaking, as well.

And, further, I have to say that the songwriters have been a big influence. I mentioned lyricism (an effect), lyric (a genre), but lyrics (as in, lyrics to songs)… they can be wild. You’ll get the most abstract and wonky piece of verse; the syntactic relationships will be so densely recombinable — the kind of lines that would be flagged as rather oblique if they were presented as poetry — and then a whole stadium of people will place those words in their mouths and sing them as their own: “O life is bigger / It’s bigger than you, and you are not me / The lengths that I will go to / The distance in your eyes” (“Losing My Religion”, R.E.M.). If you reckon people aren’t interested in difficult and abstract verbal constructions, then you haven’t been paying close enough attention to songs. That relationship between the singable, shareable line and the density of meaning that travels under its music… it’s a very very special thing, and poets should look there for energy. Then, of course, you get the songwriters of extraordinary, winning, straightforward eloquence: “In my head / I play a supercut of us / All the magic we gave off / All the love we had and lost” (“Supercut”, Lorde).

Paula: Are there other poets who you especially admire for their lyricism?

Jackson: Auden is king, but I would never have approached him or probably poetry at all if it weren’t for Frank O’Hara. O’Hara’s early poems display a French influence and are certainly his most lyric in the genre sense of the word. But I like the relaxed, fluent, chatty later style, too. The studied naturalness of those later poems is very special — and I think weird and weirder for how it’s self-reflexively “casual”, rendered, and so not casual at all.

‘Adam’

Paula: The opening poem, ‘Prelude’ is the perfect stepping stone into a collection that cares as much for the invisible as for the visible, for space and quiet and hollows.

And for self. For intimate self. Hollow self. Thinness of self. Emptying out and taking in. Fabrication. Pronouns on the move. We readers are gathering to listen. Some poets hold self at a distance when they write, while others venture into the super confessional, or poetic fictions.

[….] Well, I too could be mean,
possessive, obsessed with my own thinness —

for a crowd had gathered like black water
to hear these: my innermost thoughts.

from ‘Adam’

‘Uniform’

I find your collection the most original navigation and weave of self I have encountered in ages. So many lines to quote! How important was and is self as these poems came into being, whether hollow or present or imagined?

Jackson: I’m not sure I was thinking directly about “self” per-se. I think a lot of the poems are sort of tricksy about the presentations of self they contain. I suppose I went to some pains to show how an author might construct a poem’s speaker, as in my poem “Uniform”. The mode is confession, but the poems are not me. Still, they’re an expression of my thinking, my emotions, my taste — maybe something about all the posing and posturing in the book is merely contradictory, then. But I hope instead that binaries such as “author/speaker” and “self/not-self” are thrown into some sort of counterpoint, melodically independent but harmonically dependent on one another, a complication rather than a contradiction. Thank you for your comment about “weave” — I think that signals that what I was going for worked for you, which is good to hear.

The next book, I reckon, will be placed more directly on what readers (and me too, if you catch me on a good day) will call “my” voice and “my” persona than some of the poems in this book. But I always allow myself to extend or fictionalise when I need to. I remember my friend Cadence Chung told me that she finished a poetry reading once and somebody came up to her and told her how brave she was. She accepted the compliment, but thought privately to herself, “Well, it would have been brave if I had read you my diary entry or cried on stage, but instead I crafted a work of poetry and then edited it and then rehearsed and performed it.” Whenever we set down words as writers, we mark a fissure in time; every time we write “I”, that typed object which we think describes our changing selves we render fixed. The poems bare me — they hold me up — but they are not me, largely because I am a person, and they are poems.

‘Music’

Paula:  On my second reading of the book, I became even more scratched and moved by the appearance of (upper case) Death and (lower case) death. 

that there’s always a distant cliffside
called Death
and somebody saying No on it,
refusing life;

that there are always those
fabricates of memory
that lacerate the present
with reminder of the past —

from ‘Music’

Past present and maybe future rubbing against each other, with tendrils in grief, whether fabrications or memory, with tendrils in death. I so ache as I read ‘Night train’, offering past or death, getting lost in the blue. 

Tell me about the recurring ache arrival of Death death.

Jackson: Thank you for noting that turn of phrase in “Night train”: one way is the past and the other way (the future, extrapolated to its extreme) is death. It’s easy to think that death is the only certainty; the only real thing, realer than life. But, as Ben Lerner reminds us, “there’s too much piety in despair” — and love, of course, is “more avant-garde than shame / or the easy distances” (“No Art”). Sometimes in the book I capitalise Death because I mean for him to be my enemy and among us, personified, or out there in the landscape. Other times, I refer more generally to the bodily phenomenon known as death. Probably that’s all I meant by the distinction, but I’m not sure. Some people say that death is the great mystery, but I don’t think so. I think life is the mystery. 

‘Night train’

Paula: Indeed. If there are the stutter echoes of death, there are also the equally affecting and connecting strands of love desire body touch sensuality.

Poetry’s not pinned down here. It’s physical and it’s longings. 

Jackson: I love that physical aspect you mention. I’m thinking back to my comments about lyricism, lyric, and lyrics here… what’s important about those aspects of writing is that they induce embodied effects in the reader, whether subvocalising in the head or reading aloud. In that way the poetry is evocative of what it means to have a body, and indeed to have sex or go out dancing or take drugs — those things people do that make them feel embodied. The longing follows naturally, because we know that the high can’t last forever; because all things and this body too will go; and because when we come, we also come apart, in “the pale light that each upon the other throws” (Wallace Stevens).

Paula: I adore your visual tropes, the power of the metaphor and similes to infuse a poem visually and, in doing so, offer ideas and feelings an uplift. I jotted down so many beauties.

“My life has since continued to devolve into a succession of windowless rooms, and at the door of each a guest is greeted and enters.”

Do you have any favourites? Something that falls into your writing ink and it’s surprise and it’s skin-prickling delight?

Jackson: I’m always surprised by what I write. Honestly, I’m just grateful that there’s something there (when there’s something there, that is!). At the moment, I quite like my poem “Happiness” for its straightforward, civic speechiness — and I like its ending image: “Take me out down the streets / of my mind and just look / at the people’s sudden faces”. “Happiness” was the last poem I wrote for the book, and it’s seemed to have dropped me into a new style and swagger, a new directness, which I feel ready for. But I worry that it includes a line I feel sometimes but don’t hold to be true: “I don’t believe that life is real”.

Paula: I love the presence of other poets, poetry books, on writing poems, on being a poem, on thinking about other poets, on sleeping with a poetry book under the pillow. What poets have nourished you over the past couple of years?

Jackson: Let me give you a list! While I was writing the book, I loved Dickinson, Auden, Glück, Frank O’Hara, James Tate, Ben Lerner, Hera Lindsay Bird, Tayi Tibble, Eliot, Carl Phillips, Li-Young Lee, Coleridge’s conversation poems, Alex Dimitrov, Bill Manhire, Maia Armistead, Sam Hunt, Cadence Chung, Jake Arthur, and Henri Cole. More recently, since finishing the manuscript, I’ve been loving Kate Camp, James Schuyler, Keats, Glück (still), and O’Hara (again).

‘Aubade’

Paula: When you were writing this collection, did you make writing discoveries? Like what mattered to you in creating a poem? And also in gathering a whole collection with its echoes and knitted strands and quietness?

Jackson: With this book, a lot of the poems I had endings for first — sometimes choice phrases, sometimes just general notions of where the poem needed to go. So a lot of the time, I was writing teleologically, hurtling toward a foregone conclusion, and that was the discovery: What conditioned or brought to my mind such a phrase as “you don’t have to be ashamed anymore” (from my poem “Aubade”)? What happens before I can allow myself this line? Conversely, in my new work I’ve found myself with some very beautiful opening stanzas but fudging the endings. This is dangerous work, and I fear for myself.

As for arranging the book… Thankfully, the echoes and motifs were more or less accidental. I was just in a particular moment as a writer, with my pet subjects and figures and turns of phrase. I think if I knew the book’s design from the start I’d be so intimidated I wouldn’t write anything at all. I just worked on a poem at a time, and eventually had the sense that they were talking to each other in generative ways, and then arranged them in an order that best sparks and reveals those ways. But it took a while for the book to come to form — some stuff is from when I was sixteen. The best you can do is put your head down and hope. What do you think I wished for? I wished for what I always wish for. I wished for another poem. (Glück)

‘Song’

Paula:  I read ‘Song’, the final poem again and I am holding my breath. How do we write? How do we read? How do we continue to write poems when the world is so awry and bombs are being dropped. This being so personal for you with your Beirut familial connections.

My cousins in Beirut can feel
the terror in the air, I go on
with so little left to speak; listen
to my heart, these songs
of loss I write while I
cannot hear the bombs.

from ‘Song’

I feel the book itself is the reply. This incredible book that was first dreamed up at Dark Sky Cottage in 2024. More hollows. More writing as going on. What do you think? Or should I be using the word feel, this book I feel so intently?

Jackson: It’s easy here to retreat into cliche. Don’t worry, you won’t find me rhapsodising about how “urgent” or “necessary” my own poetry is. Poetry probably isn’t necessary, strictly speaking. It doesn’t happen because somebody thought it financially viable or ethically responsible or somehow socially vital. But in the bombed cities, the wasted homes, the dishevelled places, poems are still being written; poems are still being written in Palestine. And so one of the reasons that artmaking remains radical is that its existence alone suggests, or even speaks into reality, however briefly, an alternative system of value. In this I’m something of an old-school progressive. Poetry goes on in the sense that it just happens — despite violence; motivated by nothing; needed, but less than shelter; heralded by no dollar, poets continue their work. Poetry also goes on in the sense that its aesthetic conception of value chafes with a world in extreme turmoil, ruled by monied interests, in which a genocide is unfolding on our phone screens; it figures by negation another, better world of no violence. For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives (Auden). And so we go on. In which direction? Ake, ake, ake; onwards.

Thanks again, Paula, for your kind words.

Jackson McCarthy is a poet based in Te-Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. He is of Lebanese, Māori, and Pākehā descent. His poetry has been published widely in Aotearoa literary journals, including Landfall Tauraka, Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems, The Spinoff, Starling, and Sweet Mammalian. Portrait (Auckland University Press, 2026) is his first book.

Auckland University Press page

Poetry Shelf celebrates Te Marama Puoro o Aotearoa | NZ Music Month 2026

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Poetry Shelf toasts Te Marama Puoro o Aotearoa | NZ Music Month 2026

Music streams in the ink of so many poets I love, whether on the page or in the ear/air. Think rhythm, rhyme, chords, key, hooks, harmonies, disharmonies, pitch, bridges. And of course the lyrics.

One of my favourite poetry books of 2026 to date, is Bill Manhire’s Lyrical Ballads (THWUP): “And of course there is the ink steeped in music, with rhyme and repetitions, loops, the exquisite lyricism that audio-marks each ballad. My dream is to sit in the Titirangi hall again and listen to Bill read us the whole book as we sit spell bound, before moving to the side room to the spread the locals have put on, to return with plates of food balancing on our knees, and to talk poetry and life until our voices are hoarse.” My review

Yesterday I finished reading Khadro Mohamed’s sublime novel Before the Winter Ends, and it is probably my favourite novel from 2025. Khadro writes with her poetic ear attuned to the musicality of words. I just adore it. I will be posting some thoughts on the book in the next week or so. In fact I seem to be binging on novels with sentences that achieve such musical cadence I am bursting with the pleasure of reading – and daydreaming upon how the ear of the reader is as important as the eye, the heart, the musing mind.

Music is such a connecting activity – listening to music gets us through tough patches, gets our bodies moving, our hearts moving. And how vital live gigs are, having our socks blown away by the utter joy and pleasure of live performances.

I have never invited open submissions to Poetry Shelf, but on the spur of a midnight moment, invited poets to contribute to a poetry / music month celebration. I made the brief open: “YES the poems will offer links to NZ music. Maybe subtle links, maybe a clear spotlight on performances, albums, past or present experiences, music anecdotes, memorable occasions, but the poems may also connect with music as part of our daily lives.”

I got an astonishing arrival of poems, and while it was super hard choosing only a handful, I think I will do a quick-fire submission invite again. Maybe in a few months. Maybe sooner.

Thank you everyone who sent poems. This was an absolute pleasure.

23 poems

Mata singing in the supermarket

It is the first sound I encounter, Mata singing,
a humming hovering over the ripe oranges, tomatoes,
the perfect newly washed potatoes, curling around
persimmons in season, the sultry scent of feijoas
Mata singing, a hibiscus flower tucked behind her ear

Her voice follows me past the morning newspaper,
beyond a magazine with Audrey Hepburn’s face
on the cover, oh those were the beautiful days,
it’s passing the wine bottles, the beer, the lo-alcohol
cans, our sober days are here, it riffs across the scent

 of soap and laundry powder, and the eggs,
bread and cheese that sustain us, Mata singing

 to children whose mother is buying a happy
birthday cake and lollies; so long as I remember
Mata has been here, her voice crooning
tunes amongst the herbs and spices,
her hair greying. One day she’s not there

 but a young woman from Samoa
is at the checkout counter, her voice
soaring. But where is Mata today? I ask.
She will be back, it’s just her day off, the song
must go on, Mata will come back, Mata singing.

Fiona Kidman

When the band played the chords
of their opening song
the crowd surged forward.

Not wanting to be crushed, 
he slipped under the stage
like a moray eel
and became immersed
in a reverberating
ocean of sound.

Richard von Sturmer
from a new poetry sequence


White duck                                 

On the way to the gig
I stopped by the sea  
the tide was in and slow.
I stood on grey and mellow
stones, marked time, looked out 
to the horizon.

A white duck meandered 
by, and as I tried (crimped 
hands, cramped knees) to revive
the swing, the feel of lines
it parked me beside me: 
white feathers, round stones. 

There were drumbeats and
triplets and words I could not 
remember, though I stared
hard at the sea, the way 
the duck did, for verse, bridge 
chorus to reappear

which they didn’t, despite 
the tight paradiddles 
of my heart and quavers 
in my knees, so I watched
the duck and the duck watched 
the sea until I had to leave,

and I think I played pretty tight,
that night at the Royal Albert.

Jillian Sullivan
“A poem, published in JAAM, from when I was a drummer (in the all- female band Red Dress, and full of nerves before a gig.”

Amy Winehouse on St Clair Esplanade

A breezy day on the Esplanade,
where nothing escapes the view,
a kid high on a can of Red Bull,
guys in hoodies puffy as cobras.
Drifting from their wound-down window,
the sob-sister on a squawk box,
— make me go to rehab, but I said no, no, no!

Backflips through an ocean’s backyard,
with dipsticks, dropkicks, surf wipe-outs,
salt haze drifting like a filmy drape,
floaty over barren rocks, eroded sand dunes,
flowers yellow as a lick of butter,
yellow as sunshine,
— make me go to rehab, but I said, no, no, no!

I buy a chocolate ice-cream cone for you.
Smiley faces and stuck-out tongues,
there’s e-scooters, shiny shells of cars,
and peeled from a seal-black wetsuit,
the pipe-band drum-major’s leg tattoo,
— make me go to rehab, but I said no, no, no!

Your pointy leather boots clack on concrete,
while hunch-backed scolds of gulls
are moving red-webbed feet to a ska beat,
they’re crying out like Amy Winehouse,
— ska, ska, ska!  — no, no, no!

The evening sky vamps like a lava lamp
of tie-dye kaftan mauves and yellows,
but now there’s no scamp Amy Winehouse
to echo along with the seagulls,
— ska, ska, ska! — no, no, no!

David Eggleton
published in Otago Daily Times in 2024

Organology

I dropped my new earrings in the sink
and fished them out again. Only a small dark

fingerprint of tarnish gave any indication
of their drainward descent. I wore them out

to the orchestra, where we stared up the legs
of the cellists, in the cheapest of cheap seats.

Sitting there with a new friend I wondered how
it all turned out like this — libraried afternoons, waiting

nights, hurried mornings — all these violins oiled
by the fingers of guys who would have worn wigs

and white powder and all the rest of it. My friend told me
he cried, and I chose to believe him. He has eyes

like I’ve seen in photographs from 1912. The evolution
of cornets mimics the evolution observed in fossils.

Ammonites curled in spirals as if sleeping. I almost
bought one the other month with my cousin, at that

incensey place on Willis Street; a tiny crystalline
thumbnail of a thing. A lover, somewhere, reaches

for a nightstand. I didn’t see any tears fall.
I saw the wood, worn and singing, and fiddled with my rings.

Cadence Chung

Quantum Decoherence at a Bailter Space Gig, 1989

20 July was my seventeenth birthday
and I went to Sammy’s on a Thursday night.
Cold and rain, a winter standard for Dunedin.
My one clear memory is standing alone
on a fairly empty dance floor,
spotlit by a stream of sodium blue light
while feeling my neural networks
being reformatted by a subsonic phase shift
on top of which an avalanche of white noise
glued loosely together with a standing wave
of human friendly harmonic frequencies
pulsed from side to side of the hall
while bodies swayed like reeds in a gale.
When I left some time after midnight
life had changed permanently,
and my inner ears were filled
with a softly anesthetic snowfall.

Victor Billot
from The Sets, Otago University Press, 2021

The Smith the Grocer girl

wipes tables, ferries plates
and bowls and cups and jugs
back and forth to the counter

After the rush
           tray-laden in the light-filled well of the old lift shaft
she looks up

and pitches a melody
rung by perfect rung
to the sky

and you know she’ll climb it

It’s for her the cutlery
has stopped clacking, and in their pre-porcelain
clay, their porous places, the saucers,

it’s for her they listen and thirst

Sue Wootton
from By Birdlight, Steele Roberts, 2011.

Phoenix Foundation
(for Will)

“En-tnt”: that was what you used to call
an elephant. You’d say “I carry
you” when you wanted to be picked up.

Each time we read that page in Peter
and Jane where the farmer is getting
ready for work, you’d shout out “Boots on!”

because on walks you wore your red boots.
You had long yellow curls like Little
Lord Fauntleroy, a Leicester accent

thick and ruddy like the local cheese.
Once in the grocer’s in Stoneygate,
an old lady bent down, stroked your hair,

murmured: “What a very pretty boy.” 
“Fook off!” you said, staring at your boots.
She jerked her hand away as though stung.

Years after, I see you running round
and round a room, arms flapping wildly.
You stop. “I can’t fly,” you say, surprised.

But here tonight you’re standing stage right
behind your barricade of drums. Shaved
head, black singlet, sticks raised, you might be

the sorcerer’s latest apprentice.
The guitars kicks in, the blue light spins,
your hands begin to fly.

Harry Ricketts
from Just Then, Victoria University Press, 2012

Martin Phillipps’ eyes

From photos, Martin Phillipps’ eyes
look out; looking for all the world like eyes forever looking out.

The music is all we have of him now.

On walks down the street where he lived
        close by our street, I ask myself: Is that the house he lived in?
Not knowing for sure, I can only guess.

For some of us, all that’s left of him is the music, the songs and any memory.
Like the one I have of seeing him, once, in the late nineties,
alone on a stage, playing keyboard

and singing, Submarine Bells. The second time, over twenty years later,
in Ian Chapman’s house at the launch of his book, OK Boomer,
where he was just a man standing at the window

looking out at the harbour, my husband beside him
both of them remarking about the weather rolling in and the yachts,
my husband not realising who the man was until he asked him his name.

Martin, the man said. Of course, my husband thought. Martin Phillipps.
Knowing then why he’d looked familiar.
        And they both just stood there a moment longer, looking out.

Kay McKenzie Cooke
“I thought immediately of this poem I wrote after the death of Martin Phillipps of the Dunedin Sound band The Chills. It is a poem that will be in my new collection, My Favourite Set of Lights, due out in November this year with The Cuba Press. Co-incidentally, a new LP by the late Martin Phillipps arrived in my email yesterday to be downloaded through Bandcamp, and today I’ve been listening to songs of his I’d never heard.”

Recipe for a Mother’s Mana
for Helen

It must be possible
to conclude a home concert
without food, without cheesecake,
chocolate cheesecake that is,
but I wouldn’t risk my motherly mana
to find out.

The day before a concert
while I listen to Maestro practise
Brahms and Gershwin on the piano
down in the lounge,
I adapt my sister’s recipe,
my hands knowing what to do.

I crush a packet of biscuits,
mix with two tablespoons of sugar
three of cocoa
and four ounces of melted butter,
then cover the bottom and up the sides
of a lined large round cake tin
with a push up bottom.

Next, as I think through To-Do lists
I beat two tubs of cream cheese
and one of cottage,
a cup of brown sugar
two tablespoons of flour
half a teaspoon of instant coffee
three quarters of a cup of cream
and three eggs.

If you’re a Luddite like me
and beat by hand, it takes time
and grunt till it’s harmoniously blended
but when it is, quickly stir in
300 g of melted dark chocolate,
pour into the crust
and when no-one’s watching
lick the bowl.

It cooks over the next hour
or a bit more in a slow oven,
the smell of melted chocolate
sweetly seeping down the hall
to Maestro at the piano
now with Helen on the viola
practising Schubert and Glazunov.

The next day, after the first course
of the post-concert dinner,
Maestro is back on the piano
jamming with Helen on viola,
violin, cello, flute, guitars
singing.

In the quiet of the dining room
I put out the expected cheesecake
and ambrosia, food of the gods ~
ambrosia ~ how I love that word,
berry yoghurt, whipped cream
tinned boysenberries
chopped marshmallows.

In the end it is simple,
make music
have concert
eat cheesecake.

Tui Bevan

Backyard Blues Revival

This sucks. Among the 
reverb thinking I was
tapu then. Not now. 
My axe rings 
in circles 
swinging back 
through 
the firewood
in my skin
cutting a shard
in scrap tōtara 
from the old farm house, 
Shick! / Thunk! It cracks 
open. Careful now. 
Not to 
take my fingers, 
pare the shard back 
down until I
am vinyl and 
ten again lost
in a picture of an 
old man playing
a Kōauau 
and seeing the soul 
of my poverty. 

i toko

rattling the tauranga jazz fest hum

you came from some crevice
      in the city’s noise
from the cafe across the road
      from its canopy of
dark-skinned grapes.

the singing blade of you
     arrived and rattled the
whispering stars
      you stood there
all jaunty in
      your tattered coat
and I wanted to
     unravel you
thread by pretty thread.

on stage
     we inverted chords 
swapped surfaces
      knelt in snow so deep
it could thaw a summer’s grief
     oh how we harmonised,
improvised,  be-bob sha-bammed
      and all of that jazz

now, pasted down far apart
     we hum those old songs
crazy with superheros and
     and bright lights
there’s a strange high note
     playing in the skies
as icarus and angels fall
      and our veins run 
feverish with loss.

Lyndsey Knight

The Thistle

Climb the stairs, and tight to the right. Up into the old tea merchants.
There was no lingering smell of potted empire when I reached the top.
Rather the punk cologne of dak, scrumpy, sweat and leather.
Wander in past the array of anarchist books, the dangerous tools of revolution.
Now a google search would be a lot quicker.
And ‘the man’ can keep his tabs remotely.
And the revolution is remoter still.
The PA is old and clad in carpet.
The amps are shared, the drum kit communal.
The masses form up; the sound system rumbles.
The old, the young, and the great unwashed, we are all in this mess together.
We are all a mess, in this mess , together.
Then two sets in, the inevitable disruption.
In flow the police, with shields and truncheons.
And down the stairs we flow, barrelling to the left with a scent of bourbon.
And out into the night of yellow and black, so full of nineteen nineties energy.
So full of pregnant possibility.

Kieran Haslet-Moore

Thistle Hall is a community hall which played a key role in Wellington’s punk/alternative/underground music scene through the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and 00’s.  

Shihad

Unite against
the apathy. 
The name on our 
backs is your name —

one shared with the
faithful rendered 
malleable 
in the forge where 

crowd surfers’ boots
smash noses of
Medusa boys
with ringing ears,

loose spines whip wild 
heads, and masses 
roar ’til they turn 
to stone. Yet, still, 

you would know us, 
struck mute, because
the name on our
backs is your name.

Bee Trudgeon

and somehow his silence

from the second row we see stagelights gleam on Jon Toogood’s forehead the bassist’s mouth clenching and unclenching the guy from The Phoenix Fountain mouthing Heart of Gold from stage left   

the man next to me has spilled out under the armrest and as the drums pulse through the seats I feel his side belly tremble against my arm

when the song ends he doesn’t clap just turns to his phone some bannered news website something about Trump

and I turn my head just enough to see his grey hair black pants plaid shirt and I’m suddenly conscious of my movements my nodding and tapping along my denim jacket my calling out into the applause

and somehow his silence has sucked something out of the night and I’m searching for it in the bags under the guitarist’s eyes the greasy fall of his hair    the grip of his hand on the fretboard grey haze of the smoke machine flicker of lights to blue as the band shifts into the wings

and there’s one guy left on the keyboard Lawrence Arabia I think his name is ginger moustache black jeans brown boots and as he starts to sing I lean into these details knit them together stitch a curtain between me and the guy beside me velvet and dense  

his belly quivers against my arm again but there’s no drummer now no bass and in my peripheral vision I see movement a plaid arm rising

and I turn my head just enough to see his thumb and finger spread into a fleshy triangle each one pressed to an eyelid the gleam of blue light in the wetness of his cheek skin

and Lawrence Arabia’s voice seems to fill the space between major and minor the smell of dust and steam the bite of IPA at the front of my mouth the question and the answer when will I see you again

when will I see you again

Rebecca Ball

Lessons

Sunday morning and the light is grey
inside this house. I embrace the heavy silence like a flood
embraces gravity
seeping down beneath buildings and soil and rocks and roots
of living things. Systemic
is in the very name of this disease
and so it takes a long while—everything
takes a long, long while. I learn to measure
distance by how it feels
to walk
to the bakery, the park, the classroom
where I teach teenagers the meaning of words like circulatory and interconnectedness. They are learning
about the human body
the way our organs
work: the heart, the lungs 
     like singing, I say
       the poetry in science
these things that keep us
alive. My flatmate
is sympathetic
says the roads to our house are all uphill
but that is not the story. I am learning
to step outside
this new set of imposed boundaries
the things we normalise
       as we gather ways
       to place our selves
in the landscape of our grief.
Sometimes it feels like I’ve
misplaced my self
and if I just look hard
enough
I might see my centre
pulsing
behind a mesh of muscle and bone
deep within my stomach with the rest
of my voice. Pacifism is not the same
as passiveness. My other students
are learning to breathe
like they did when they were babies
the diaphragmatic ebb and pull
       before we grow
       into the panting, holding
tightness
of everyday. But it’s difficult.
We relax and focus at once. Try to recall
the measured freedom
of youth
the evenness, the newness
the burst of life and noise
       because babies come out
       crying
ready to sing

Lola Elvy

Voyager

this tiny machine
this analog toy
this little adventurer
a glorious toddler
exploring the unimaginable
vastness
of its boundaries
speaks greetings
from Akkadian to Wu

and the walking tribes
that dream their dreams
of the rainbow serpent
sing Johnny B. Goode
and play Mozart
Bach and Stravinsky
at 16 and 2/3 rpm if the finder
has a decent record player

tethered to us by hope
and grit
and dreams
and yesterday’s genius
and dial up speeds
of imagery and sound
and the cacophany of
creatio
go looking for God
beyond grasp of the sun
beyond its anger
its rage
its wrath

the war within itself
that will destroy it
one day
one day
one
day

Ben Brown

Oh my

I was born a devil, he tells me
licking salt off my skin

holy smoke rising from his hot 
wings

invites me to feast on gravel and wine,
drive the black sheep over the edge 

of this world.

Everybody’s doing it, he says,
smudging the clear dome of my cornea

and I know we’re doomed to die
regardless of what’s written in the water.

Drunk on air, he tastes licorice and tar
notes of sulphur

black sand scorching, scorching.

Mikaela Nyman
“A tribute to Gin Wigmore’s ‘Written in the Water Die Regardless'”

Community Choir

It’s November
& next month, December
we’ll sing at the Rest Home, Silent Night

Pam, alto, says     I keep slipping into lead
Pat, bass, says     I want to move on ‘dawn’
Jay, tenor, says    You leave Dawn alone

Everyone laughs
The dog licks Diane’s – soprano – toes
I’ve been in the garden, she says & everyone laughs again

& Pat learns not to move on dawn
& Pam learns not to sing the lead
& Jay puts his right foot in & his right foot out

Jay shakes it all about & everyone laughs once more     Oh Jay!
& Diane’s toes are clean now
That’s better, she says

Sam Duckor Jones

Hugh playing the Moonlight

Hugh is playing the Moonlight
to the valley.

In swannie, shorts and Tuesday’s
socks he takes the stage before
kānuka and jostling miro.

He begins to play.

The kahikātea on the balcony
adjusts the stars upon her
shoulders.

Tawai on the high terrace
bend to pay attention and
kōwhai huddle close where
they can sway in their yellow
ear rings.

Lizard, spider, bird and fish,
rock and lichen, creek and
tussock hold their breath.

Hugh’s fingers find notes
like seeds sown on a stave.
He plants them in the dark
and the music sets leaf. It
grows into a supple vine,
looping tree to tree.

There is nothing more
beautiful in nature than
a man in a swannie,
playing the Moonlight.

Fiona Farrell
Nouns, Verbs etc: Selected poems, OUP, 2020

Be the rising human

Ava and Jasmine wanted to marry you
All the girls wanted to marry you
and you were not even four years old

When you slithered into this world
you opened your eloquent eyes
and cradled silence

From your ancestors, harmony impregnated all pores
Those eyes saw distances beyond the now
observed here from afar and afar from near

A small cough like a chipmunk scattering leaves
and words flow into poems into songs
You are thrumming. Music another name

A tiger-swallowtail alights on bee balm
vacated by hummingbirds and the knock
knock of a pileated woodpecker high in hemlock

tells us you are in this hemisphere, panting for cool air
It’s coming and the cold cold winter too
but autumn gifts us your embrace

Those genes are not ordinary DNA, those genes
Are pure love (made in Australia like your kuia)
Pushed out in Aotearoa now rising in Londontown

Be the leaf, be the branch, be the trunk, be the root
Be the river, be the air, be the soil, be the garden
Be the rising human in this world, beloved

Reihana Robinson
from Be the rising human, Off the Common Press, 2024

Prelude

A mother practices a prelude
agile fingers working
Florence Price’s minor thirds,
woven memory           loss     survival

A daughter scores sounds
from a tired world
corals and crickets      new phrasings
for better    listening

A woman watches the moon
round and full
rising      over earth’s shoulders
hunched   around a harbour

Harmonies      dissonances         blended experience
recollection                 rippling
crooked lines in a poem’s spaces       imagining
what comes next

Michelle Elvy
from in the poetry / art exhibit ‘The Wild Edge’, Arataki Visitor Centre, Jan-Mar 2026. 

Moonlight spell

We reach the point
the mind forgets the mind.
Across our great divide

and down to moon-soaked
spots on the floor. I want
to be so consumed by something,

to think that there is no way out.
Turn off the headlights. Tap the stream.
If poetry could make you love me,

it would, I think. Close the windows.
Lock the door. Show me things.
Show me more.

Jackson McCarthy
“These poems were first published in Starling‘s Issue 14, then set to music by my dear friend Cadence Chung.”

Poetry Shelf 2025 highlights (or some summer reading and listening)

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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 a deep love of what words can do, whether exuberant or sweetly nuanced.

Every poetry book I have picked up, lingered over and reviewed (see photos below 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, plus some new ideas. I have included a link to the fabulous Te Whāriki anthology where some of the contributors selected a favourite poetry book of 2025. And to a handful of special moments on the bogs.

Thank you so much everyone for your incredible support.

Some Special Poetry Shelf Moments

Celebrating the poetry of Brian Turner (1944- 2025)

Celebrating Dinah Hawken, winner of Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry

Poetry Shelf celebrates National Poet Laureate Chris Tse a farewell & thank you

Celebrating Robert Sullivan, our new Poet Laureate

My conversation with Anna Jackson, in which we share our love of poetry

Celebrating Emma Neale winning Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry 2025

Gaza by Bill Manhire

Jillian Sullivan’s poems sent from Te Araroa

Poetry Shelf celebrates a Laureate evening

Jackson McCarthy Playing Favourites

Michelle Elvy’s poem dispatches from USA (there are more)

My love of cookbooks: Take Me to Spain by Melanie Jenkins and Jo Wilcox

My love of cookbooks 2: My Weekend Table by Gretchen Lowe

Poetry Shelf Protest series: ‘Reading Poetry to Rare Lizards’ – Poetry in Defence of the Environment

My love of art: Dick Frizzell show and memoir

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 and Summer readings
Poets read and talk poetry for around twenty minutes

Philomena Johnson reading
Jenna Heller reading
Craig Foltz reading
Richard von Sturmer reading
Jo McNeice reading
Ruby Macomber, Molly Laurence and CR Green
Anne Kennedy reading
Poetry Shelf’s cafe reading for NZ Poetry Day plus breaking news
Poetry Shelf review and readings: Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025 – breath
Aruna Joy Bhakta reading
Harry Ricketts reading
Alexandra Cherian reading
Ethan Christensen reading
Sue Wootton reading

interview and readings: Koe: An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology
Poets read from Te Moana o Reo: Ocean of Languages

Books I reviewed and loved in 2025


Write name in side bar and check out my review
Many of the books I reviewed included readings

Books on my must-read pile

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.

Junction Box

sitting here at the junction box
of war and peace and flowing waters
hearing the soundtrack of bush haven
hearing the dawn bugle the flyover the kōrero the silence
searching in the manukā for remedy cables
mourning every raised weapon every sacrifice
every empty stomach displaced refugee every cruel act
the weasel words from weasel politicians
jamming our children in square learning boxes
slamming our hospitals in low voltage budgets
cramming our planet in polluted circuits extinction coils
feeling in this breaking dawn the connecting calls for peace
picturing protest placards holding voices of resistance past and present
picturing aid workers risking life to nurse and feed and shelter
picturing a global jigsaw puzzle of greed and smash and grab
for how long have we imagined peace have we called for peace
for how long have we imagined blue sky transformation
today we are standing here holding our currents of hope
and yes today we are joining in calls for peace calling calling calling

25 April 2025
Paula Green

widening the gap

in the wild night of storm the wind is widening the gap
or is it the roar of a government hellbent on building

a ravine between the rich and the poor Māori and Pakeha
in every choice they make. A school curriculum has lost

sight of the prismatic stories that shape us, sums that include
x-factor joy, and I am stuck on this freight train

in the widening gap because I see no end to damage and despair and
I’m filling an ocean with tears crying over lessons that slam the door

in the face of poverty or another language or the tangata whenua
and this rumble gap is the distance between sick earth and well earth

between building roads and restoring our hospitals and schools
and here I am holding my fragile torch to the widening gap

in my sodden socks no idea where to shine the light next yet
except maybe on all those protestors from the 1960s who are stomping

in the streets even louder now with their dreams our dreams where women
are heard where Māori are heard my bones breaking and I am blowing

all around to resist persist hope dream begging to fill this gap with precious care
to build glorious people-friendly bridges out of knowledge and foresight.

Paula Green
October 2025

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.