in the seam of a dream I find myself in the dream of a seam I write spilling onto the roads of imagined cities
I don’t know about you but poetry in Aotearoa in 2026 is a sizzling simmering dazzling arrival of new books. I keep picking a book from the review stack and find myself electrified nourished challenged utterly in awe with what words can do within and beyond the form and possibilities of a poem.
Thank you for your continued support as readers and writers, and for sharing the POETRY LOVE.
Poetry Shelf Playing Favourites: Anne Kennedy picks Bill Manhire
Poetry Shelf review: Before the Winter Ends by Khadro Mohamed
Poetry Shelf Breathing Room: Puanga by Airini Beautrais
Poetry Shelf celebrates Ariana Tikao’s Pepeha Portal – a review and a reading
an invitation
Poetry Shelf Off the Shelf: I want to start a new series on Poetry Shelf where we pick a beloved New Zealand poetry book from at least a couple of years ago, maybe twenty, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred. A poetry blast from the past. Choose the book. Write one or two paragraphs on why the book has stuck to you. With permission we could even include a poem from it. I will post on the blog.
Please note our Swanson Post Box lobby is closing in the next few days so will advise you soon of our new post box.
Before the Winter Ends, Khadro Mohamed Tender Press, 2025
The entire courtyard is bathed in bright orange. Omar feels a prickling in his eyes and he lets tears fall. His mother is rubbing her soil-stained fingers together when she turns to him. Her eyes have grown soft. Instead of saying anything, because there is nothing she can say, she reaches across the space between them and grips his hand. His grandmother calls for them in the distance. The Adan rings across the houses.
from Before the Winter Ends
Khadro Mohamed’s debut novel, Before the Winter Ends, is the kind of novel that sticks to you in vital ways. For me, it is a complete and utterly satisfying narrative package. Khadro writes with her poet’s ear attuned to the flow of the sentences (her debut poetry collection We’re All Made of Lightning won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of Poetry at the 2023 Ockham NZ Book Awards). Oh yes, and Tender Press have a done an excellent production job!
I love this book. I love this book so very much.
This year I am drawn to novels that are written in ink that is musical, with sonic rewards multiple. I am drawn to characters that fold and unfold into the plains and mountains and valleys of human experience. Khadro’s characters, particularly the protagonist Omar and his family, draw me deep, oh so very deep into humanity, with their various connections to past and present and future.
I am drawn into the physical world, so present in illuminating detail. Physical scenes alive with detail, with food, the wafting flavours and preparation and customs and associations. And most importantly, the movement between places, between Wellington, Egypt and Somalia. And this movement, geographical, familial, these attachments and displacements, feel as relevant to today, as they were in the 1999 and 2019 of the novel’s narrative.
Omar is a struggling university student in Wellington. He lives with his mother, Asha, who is ill. He hangs out with his uni buddy, Nick. He speaks on the phone to his grandmother in Egypt. He has rarely talked to his aunt Fardowsa who has lived in multiple African cities. He can’t stop thinking about his enigma father, Yasser, who went missing in war-plagued Mogadishu of 1999 and is a persistent and troubling gap. Omar is learning Arabic and Somalian. He is sitting in his science lab with a lost-in-the-bush feeling, tuning out, wanting to set fire to his afro, and by the end of class:
“The bush fire in Omar’s mind has eased to a single flame by the end of the lab. He welcomes it but tries to ignore the scorched landscape left in its wake.”
Before the Winter Ends is in three parts. Part 1, Wellington in 2019, introduces Omar and Asha with connections and misconnections. Part 2, in Cairo, Egypt and in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1999, returns to the meeting of his parents. Part 3, is Cairo in 2019 when Asha and Omar go to to see his grandmother and aunt. It’s his first visit. And there’s a small final section that returns to Mogadishu Somalia.
This novel is one you hold to your heart with its mesh of grief and silence and challenge, its currents of distance and intimacy and epiphany.
We learn more about Asha in the second part. The Asha buried inside the ill woman in Wellington. How this moved me, as I stretch out to women’s struggles across time and place. Asha makes sacrifices to be a wife, to be alone at home, she who had dreams of teaching Somali literature, and there’s her husband Yasser heading out the door to the library. When she asks for mint, Yasser buys her pomegranates. His empty sorry, a hollow echo. And sorry becomes an ache refrain. The seeing and not been seen. Language and dream buried deep in her tongue and heart and mind. This precious pregnant woman who travels to Wellington to nourish new life tendrils.
This is heart reading. This is making me care so deeply about this young man. This mother. About where and how to be in the knife-edge, war-smashed world we inhabit.
This is a novel on being seen and seeing. On the need to be seen. On the self-restoring act of seeing.
This a novel on saying and being said. On not being able to say what is reached for, struggled for, deflated by, exhausted by. On being able to. On being able to say.
This is also a novel on healing, on navigating the paths ahead.
Read this precious novel. Let it settle under your skin and travel with you, as together we navigate the roads ahead, the roads behind, and with heart to heart, the roads we share and stand upon, reading, writing, speaking, doing, listening.
Khadro Mohamed is a writer and poet living in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. She has a bachelor’s degree in biology from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington. She’s originally from Somalia and has a deep connection with her whakapapa, which is often a huge source of inspiration for her poetry. Her poetry has appeared in online magazines such as: Starling, Salient Magazine, Pantograph Punch, Poetry Shelf, The Spinoff and more. Her debut poetry collection, We’re All Made of Lightning (Tender Press, 2022), won the Jessie Mackay Prize for Best First Book of Poetry at the 2023 Ockham NZ Book Awards.
We’re All Made of Lightning, Khadro Mohamed, We Are Babies, 2022
from ‘A Nomadic Odyssey’
Khadro Mohamed, originally from Somalia, lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Her writing has appeared in a number of Aotearoa online journals. She acknowledges her attachments to Somalia, Aotearoa and Egypt in her poetry, and her writing becomes a form of home.
I have finished reading We’re All Made of Lightning and I am still breathing in the poetry. I am making lists for the months ahead of me, packing my emotional and physical bags, finding nourishment in the writing of others. Willing poetry to make a difference to the way we inhabit the world, to the way we move through the day. Willing poetry to be the window that opens up the wide expanse of who we are. How we are.
You are not violet You are not hands filled with morning light You are not skin made of bone Of tears pooling int the corners of my eyes You are not the pāua shells that cling to the end of your hair
from ‘You Are Not’
An early poem, ‘The Second Time’, opens upon Egypt, and I am immediately transported to an aunt’s home, to the physicality of place that ignites all senses, to the food shared, the conversations, the evocative writing that compares an Egyptian autumn to ‘ripened sweet corn and sweet potato skin’.
Khadro’s debut collection is prismatic, probing, resonant with heart pulse. The book is still sitting beside me on the bed sparking multiple lights into the room. The lights of elsewhere which are infused with the lights of here, the lights of here which are boosted by the lights of elsewhere. Each poem is tethered in some glorious and moving way to whakapapa, to homelands, to self. To the awkwardness of speaking another tongue. To the life that is etched, tattooed, imprinted upon skin. Feelings. Longings. Epiphanies.
The book is sitting bedside, and I am thinking home is a state of mind we carry in our hearts as well as on our skin, and that it is relationships, and it is the physicality of place that feeds all senses and that can be so badly missed.
Khadro is asking for story and song. How to speak? And she is speaking within the honeyed fluency of her lines, with recurring motifs: herbs and tea, storm, typhoon and hurricane, ghosts and rain, ash and pain, chocolate and dates, drownings and rescue.
She is showing the searing wound, the challenges of being a young Muslim woman in a different home. She is responding to the barely pronounceable impact of March 15th. And there it is. The intolerable virus: a hatred that is fuelled by the colour of skin, a language spoken, one’s lineage, one’s dress or food or religion. Here in Aotearoa and across the world.
The book is beside me on the bed, and I am willing poetry to make a difference. And for me it does. To pick up this astonishing book of vulnerability and strength, of journey and vision, is to take up Khadro’s invitation and step into her home, into her poems, to share her tea and listen to her songs, her stories, her hope and her comfort. In her endnote, which she admits she had trouble writing, she thanks the reader. I am thanking Khadro and We Are Baby Press for a book ‘worth holding onto’, in multiple milky star ways.
We Are Babies is made up of Carolyn DeCarlo, Jackson Nieuwland, Stacey Teague, Ash Davida Jane, Nat-Lîm Kado, and Ya-Wen Ho. Our kaupapa is to create a space for writing and writers that might not be able to find a home elsewhere. We are focused on publishing work by LGBTQIA+, disabled, Māori, Pasifika, BIPOC, and otherwise marginalised writers. We also have a particular interest in works in translation, debut and out-of-print books, and experimental writing. We are open to works of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and hybrid forms.
We Are Babies is in its first season. In November/December, we are publishing Whai by Nicole Titihuia Hawkins and Requiem for a Fruit by Rachel O’Neill. These books are currently available for pre-order at wearebabies.net. In March, we will be publishing Anomalia by Cadence Chung and We’re All Made of Lightning by Khadro Mohamed. We chose the following poems as representative of what these collections have on offer. We hope you enjoy their work as much as we have been.
On Nicole’s poem:
This poem was the inspiration for the cover of Nicole’s book, which is taken from a photograph of a multi-coloured piupiu made by Rita Baker (aka Flaxworx), a contemporary artist working in the Far North. This poem describes Nicole’s grandmother, whose legendary rainbow piupiu lends itself to the title of the poem. The tone Nicole uses here is so encapsulating of this collection as a whole–pride in kōrero o mua, a kind of nostalgia for things she didn’t get to experience, and the process of affirming of her heritage. These poems are heart-wrenchingly personal, but written in a way that brings the reader along on her journey. So much aroha.– Carolyn DeCarlo
On Rachel’s poem:
I’ve been a fan of Rachel O’Neill’s writing for almost a decade now and this might be my favourite poem of hers I’ve come across in all those years. I remember hearing her perform it at a reading at our house. She had the audience in convulsions. I was so glad to come across this poem again when Rachel submitted her manuscript. It brings a grin to my face every time I reread it. It might just be my raison d’être. – Jackson Nieuwland
On Cadence’s poem:
This poem is one of many gems from Cadence’s forthcoming collection, with language so lush it drips with imagery. As a teaser for what’s to come, the poet takes herself apart piece by piece, and puts herself under the microscope. It reminds me of the old nursery rhyme that says girls are made of ‘sugar and spice, and everything nice’, only Cadence turns the question back on itself and reveals the process of dissection, slightly gruesome and certainly not nice. – Ash Davida Jane
On Khadro’s poem:
I’m really lucky to be editing Khadro’s manuscript, there are so many magical moments contained within it, and this poem is a perfect example. Its rich and beautiful language builds a bridge between Aotearoa and Africa. It reads as a love letter to her homeland and herself. – Stacey Teague
The poems
Rainbow Piupiu
I don’t know enough about the tipuna I’m named after but when I read she was a weaver I feel her stitching tāniko into the bodice of my insides
She says it doesn’t hurt that much When I breathe in hundreds of tiny holes expand but her pattern holds its place like the ocean holds the stars that got us here
I don’t know anything about kākahu but when I hear she made cloaks from juicy kererū I can feel her weaving muka into my shoulder blades
She says to hold still When I breathe out they move in rhythm rows on rows of feathers align like the tides with the winds that carried us here
I’ve never heard of a Rainbow Piupiu but when I’m told she made one I can feel her binding the cords around my soft waist
She says she had ten babies by my age When I swirl my hips the piupiu dances each dyed band melts into another colour like her blood into the salt that brought us here
Nicole Titihuia Hawkins
A reason for everything
One day there is a reason for everything. Except, the following morning there are no reasons, only raisins, just like the philosopher warned you. The next day you go to work and your colleague asks, ‘What’s your raisin, though?’ You hand your colleague a bit of paper. On it you have written, ‘What if there is no raisin?’ Your colleague can’t handle the implication that all men walking the earth are without a single raisin, that even the smallest of raisins is missing. That night you can’t sleep. Being unconscious and prone and partially paralysed for up to eight hours without a raisin no longer seems sensible. If only there was one good raisin left in the world, you think. If only it could be found.
Rachel O’Neill
anatomy
i am made from milk teeth, not yet weaned from this world though it may try to pull itself from my wet pink gums
i will hang on to its grit for a moment and a moment and a moment longer. i am made of dandelion fluff
spinning like spokes into living rooms and kitchens and trying to find a home somewhere, a place to seed
and stay. all i want is for someone to divide me into neat parts and lay them all out, so i can see
the pesky veins that cause my blood to swim, the blushing heart that tries to love more than it can chew through
o, silly organs of mine, i would say you fools of longing, lust and time hot and carnal and really nothing like
a seed or petal—o to be made of pretty white taffeta or downy petals instead of such heavy instruments
that weigh me down. o to have people take out their tweezers and glasses to have them examine me and pull
me apart, marvelling at each lovely piece that comes out—the heart the spleen, the liver, the brain
sparkling like jewels crisp as bug wings and with just as much glister
Cadence Chung
IF I GO BACK
//
if I ‘go back to where I came from’ I will take everything with me. my mason jars with fireflies, my golden bangles, my morning coffee. I will take my earth, my horned melons and stories of cleopatra I will take that rug, the one you love so much, with the golden tassels and delicately picked butterfly wings. I will take my turmeric
my henna, my lemongrass and my acacia leaves. I will take my language, heavy and soft in the palms of my hands I will tuck my afrobeats and hip-hop in my back pocket I will carry the moon in my bindle, my chocolate in a zip-lock bag
I will carry my baobab and the cash you owe me in my backpack and then you’ll be left with naked kings and queens with concave bellies and hollow, scooped out eyes because their fancy fabric, thin sclera and jewelled crowns belong to me too.
Ama Ata Adioo once said ‘what would the world be without Africa?’ and I think I know now. it would no longer grow roses, it would be void of lyrical words and sweet orange pulp that melt on my tongue the earth would be scaly and dry, the wind would not whistle. there would be a dent in the air every time you took a breath. there would be no myriad of reds and purples dancing across the sky.
Khadro Mohamed
The poets
Cadence Chung is a poet, musician, and student at Wellington High School. She has been writing poetry since she was at primary school, and since then has loved writing, whether it be songs, short stories, or poems. Outside of poetry, she draws inspiration from classic literature, Tumblr text posts, and roaming antique stores.
Nicole Titihuia Hawkins (Ngāti Kahungunu ki te Wairoa, Ngāti Pāhauwera) is a novice writer, avid home-baker and proud aunt. She lives in Pōneke and works at a local high school teaching English, Social Studies and tikanga Māori. Nicole is also involved in pastoral care and facilitates Kapa Haka. Nicole has collaborated with other writers to host ‘Coffee with Brownies’, which are open mic events for people of colour to share their work in safe spaces. She co-hosted ‘Rhyme Time’, a regional youth event, with Poetry in Motion, to encourage a diverse range of youth to perform their incredible poetry. Nicole has work published by Overland, Capital Magazine, Blackmail Press and The Spinoff Ātea and credits her courageous students with inspiring her to write.
Khadro Mohamed is a 20-something year old poet residing on the shores of Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She’s a tea lover, a photo enthusiast, an occasional poet… and that’s pretty much it. You can find bits of her writing floating around Newtown in Food Court Books and online.
Rachel O’Neill is a Pākehā storyteller who was raised in the Waikato and currently lives and works in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Kāpiti Coast. Rachel enjoys collaborating with writers, artists and filmmakers on publications, exhibitions and works for screen, and they are a founding member of the four-artist collaborative group, All the Cunning Stunts. A graduate of Elam School of Fine Arts (BA/BFA) and the International Institute of Modern Letters (MA), Rachel was selected for the 2017 Aotearoa Short Film Lab, received a 2018 SEED Grant (NZWG/NZFC) for feature film development, and held a 2019 Emerging Writers Residency at the Michael King Writers Centre. Their debut book, One Human in Height (Hue & Cry Press) was published in 2013. As a queer non-binary storyteller Rachel strives to represent the longing for connection and the humour and strangeness that characterise human experience.
NZ Poetry Shelf 