Min-a-rets issue 8 autumn 2018

edited by Erena Shingade

published by Compound Press

drawings by Harry Moritz

poems by:

Victor Billot

Freya Daly Sadgrove

Lee Thomson

Zack Anderson

Murray Edmond

Courtney Sina Meredith

Manon Revuelta

Naomi Scully

This is multi-note poetry – each poem a sharp turn to different effect but the poetry co-exists so sweetly.  There is not a dud note.

Today I am in the mood for surprise.

Zack Anderson’s ‘Vapor Wake’ is a lush string of words, a momentum of startling image and sound. A taste:

shadow the streaming track

the wormy spoor

the hex print

the luminous index

data streaming from me

like a wedding dress

a mantle, a mantis

a veil

Murray Edmond goes ‘Camping in the existential forest’ with tercets that wryly build a miniature narrative, strange, theatrical and evocative:

III

Someone coming in

gumboots. Tramp tramp tramp. Beat

of own tell-tale heart.

Courtney Sina Meredith hooks me with an off-kilter memoir-like cluster of little pieces, definitely luminous. From ‘Pony’:

Baths

Unless my memory is playing tricks on me. The rats

were white with blazing red eyes.

I’m translating myself from a time when I was sure.

I recently did an email conversation with Manon Revuelta where I enthused about her debut collection, Girl Teeth. This new poem, ‘Prayer’, shows the subtle along with the degrees of surprise and lyricism Manon is capable of. A taste:

Look at this busy dance I do with my hand

When I’m talking to people

Shredding paper in the darkness of my pocket

It is the quiet work of saying things

Min-a-ret 8 is a treat to be read on multiple occasions like a good album that needs multiple listenings.

Min-a-rets page

Erena Shingade is a poet and arts writer from Auckland, New Zealand. Her work has been published by platforms such as The Spinoff, Landfall, Mimicry, Blackmail Press, Atlanta Review, Ka Mate Ka Ora, & the New Zealand Electronic Poetry Centre. After completing an MA thesis on the Zen Buddhist poetry of Richard von Sturmer in 2017, she continues to research the intersection of the poetic and the religious. During the day she works as a publicist for Allen & Unwin.