In this follow-up collection to the award-winning The Truth Garden, Emma Neale asks where exactly do the personal and the political drop hands? In poems that are engaged, compelling, witty and moving, she looks at how we navigate a true line through the psychological, environmental, social and economic anxieties of our times. The book examines love in its many guises, and also energetically responds to the distractions and delights of the digital age. Writing of Emma Neale’s ‘kitchen-familiar and cosmic-wide attentions’, Poet Laureate Vincent O’Sullivan has said, ‘There is something so celebratory about Emma Neale’s poetry, about its eager, informed, needle-eyed engagement with the contemporary world … [She runs] the hot thread of linguistic flare and precision through whatever occasion she takes up.’

Bind: paperback

Pages: 80

Dimensions: 160 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 03-07-2015

Strong Words #2 showcases the long-listed entries for the 2019 and 2020 Landfall essay competitions. The contents, often poetic and psychologically insightful, gave editor Emma Neale a ‘hell of an intriguingly hard time’ deciding which sparkling explorations would knock off the others for the top three places in each year. This anthology gives readers a chance to sample the high quality work entered, without the agony of having to choose the winners. Including well-known names and promising newcomers, the contents roam far and wide over a number of subjects, such as Sarah Harpur’s irreverent, laugh-aloud essay about death; Siobhan Harvey’s potent essay about the memories of an abusive childhood stirred up by current house renovations; and Tan Tuck Ming’s essay about technology and how it mediates, enables and impacts intimate relationships. Strong Words #2 also includes the joint winners of the 2019 essay prize: Tobias Buck’s ‘Exit. Stage Left’, which explores issues of prejudice and bias through the experience of someone ‘the colour of cotton candy or pink marshmallows’, and Nina Mingya Powles’ work ‘Tender Gardens’, exploring Chinese cultural and poetic heritage and how to maintain a sense of home in a foreign land.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 184

Dimensions: 165 x 215 mm

Publication Date: 01-06-2021

In Emma Neale’s first collection of short fiction, the tales range from the surreal to the real; from the true to the tall. This collection includes some of her internationally recognised flash fiction and more extended examinations of the eerie gaps and odd swerves in intimate relationships. There are confidence tricksters, compulsive liars, emotional turn-coats, the pulse of jumbled childhood memory still felt in adult life, the weird metamorphosis of fantasy hardening into reality. A woman meets up with an ex-lover after twenty years, to be told an outrageous secret; a mother takes her ailing son to a doctor for an undocumented condition; a bride is left at the altar; a brother and sister reel from a family tragedy decades after the event; a children’s birthday party turns all Queen of the Flies; a hidden family legacy appears in a grand-daughter’s strange affliction. From everyday realism to the speculative and imaginary, recurring motifs in these stories (the scientist father; the mystery of identity even within families; what we can’t know about even those closest to us) toy with the boundaries between memory and the unknown: the blending of the real and the invented.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 128

Dimensions: 153 x 234 mm

Publication Date: 19-07-2021

Featured Artists: Claire Beynon, Ewan McDougall (cover artist) and Bridget Reweti Awards & Competitions: Results from the 2021 Charles Brasch Young Writers Essay Competition Other Highlights: The latest reviews of New Zealand Books as well as stunning new writing from established literary heavyweights and thrilling new voices - the work promises to range from the wry, ludic and lyrical, to gripping body horror as social commentary, which is at once comic and unsettling.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 208

Dimensions: 165 x 215 mm

Publication Date: 01-05-2021

FEATURED ARTISTS Vita Cochran, Star Gossage, Robert West AWARDS & COMPETITIONS Results from the 2020 Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition WRITERS John Adams, Johanna Aitchison, John Allison, Shaun Bamber, Tony Beyer, Iain Britton, Medb Charleton, Ruth Corkill, Doc Drumheller, Mark Edgecombe, Lynley Edmeades, David Eggleton, Johanna Emeney, Rhys Feeney, Michael Giacon, Carolyn Gillum, Patricia Grace, Eliana Gray & Jordan Hamel, Isabel Haarhaus, Bernadette Hall, Sarah Harpur, Jenna Heller, Stephanie Johnson, Erik Kennedy, Brent Kininmont, Megan Kitching, Claire Lacey, Leonard Lambert, Wes Lee, Malinna Liang, Emer Lyons, Carolyn McCurdie, Cilla McQueen, Owen Marshall, Talia Marshall, Zoë Meager, James Norcliffe, Keith Nunes, Kōtuku Tithuia Nuttall, Vincent O’Sullivan, Leanne Radojkovich, essa may ranapiri, Gillian Roach, Pip Robertson, Jo-Ella Sarich, Tim Saunders, Sarah Scott, Sarah Shirley, Elizabeth Smither, Charlotte Steel, Nicola Thorstensen, Rushi Vyas, Susan Wardell REVIEWS Landfall Review Online: books recently reviewed SARAH HARPUR on Funny As: The Story of New Zealand Comedy by Paul Horan and Phillip Matthews PETER SIMPSON on Peat by Lynn Jenner EMMA GATTEY on Life on Volcanoes: Contemporary Essays, ed. Janet McAllister JOHN GERAETS on Verses by Lola Ridge; Two or more islands by Diana Bridge; and The Dangerous Country of Love and Marriage by Amy Leigh Wicks MAIRÉAD DE RÓISTE on Singing the Trail: The story of mapping Aotearoa New Zealand by John McCrystal DAVID EGGLETON on The New Photography: New Zealand’s first-generation contemporary photographers by Athol McCredie

Pages: 208

Dimensions: 165 x 215 mm

Publication Date: 01-05-2020

Judging her first Landfall Essay Competition in 2018, Landfall editor Emma Neale was seriously challenged. The overall high quality of the 90 submissions made it impossible to choose. After a nails-bitten-to-the-quick struggle, she optimistically submitted her ‘shortlist’ of 21 essays. The publisher had some strong words with her. Emma was told a shortlist needed to be shorter than 21. A lot shorter. There were no fingernails left to chew. She wasn’t flexible enough to bite her toes. The only thing left to gnaw down was the too-long list. In the end she pared the list back to 10 but it seemed so wasteful not to be awarding many more prizes. The world needed to be able to read these damned fine essays. That’s when this book was born … Strong Words is a striking collection of essays that show what Virginia Woolf once described as the art that can at once ‘sting us wide awake’ and yet also ‘fix us in a trance which is not sleep but rather an intensification of life’. It celebrates an extraordinary year in New Zealand writing.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 184

Dimensions: 215 x 165 x 20 mm

Publication Date: 01-11-2019

To the Occupant takes the everyday and transforms it into something fine and precious and enduring. With an unsparing attention, Emma Neale creates shape-shifting poems that confound prejudices and subvert expectations. Displaying verve and confidence, her poetry is filled with musicality and dynamic language, always observant to the world and its details. The striking imagery and emotional range of her work never veer into sentimentality. These poems engage with the full spectrum of human emotion and experience, the hauntings of history, the cold hand of social inequality, and the long contrail of intimate cruelties. They challenge the open and latent violence of contemporary life, from refugee crises to rape, poverty and mental illness to climate change, while revealing the extraordinary in the everyday, where a child’s-eye view of the world can witness the wonder of the new or the shadow of darkness. Whimiscal typographical experiments and prose poems sit next to reimagined fables (the Big Bad Wolf repurposed as inner demon), deliciously light-handed satire, and quietly powerful insights into the contemporary political terrain. To the Occupant is an innovative and astounding collection from one of New Zealand’s leading writers of her generation.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 80

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

SELLING POINTS • Results and winning essay from the Landfall Essay Competition 2018 • Results from Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize 2018 FEATURED ARTISTS John Z Robinson, Justin Spiers, Susan Te Kahurangi King AWARDS & COMPETITIONS Results and winning essays from the Landfall Essay Competition 2018, with judge’s report by Emma Neale, and results from the Caselberg Trust International Poetry Prize 2018, with judge’s report by David Eggleton WRITERS Philip Armstrong, Jane Arthur, Tusiata Avia, Antonia Bale, Tony Beyer, Victor Billot, Madeleine Child, Thom Conroy, Jodie Dalgleish, Doc Drumheller, Breton Dukes, Ciaran Fox, David Gregory, Michael Hall, René Harrison, Siobhan Harvey, Trevor Hayes, Kerry Hines, Joy Holley, Elizabeth Kirkby-McLeod, Megan Kitching, Jessica Le Bas, Therese Lloyd, Jess MacKenzie, Frankie McMillan, Alice Miller, Michael Mintrom, Lissa Moore, James Norcliffe, Heidi North, Jilly O’Brien, Vincent O’Sullivan, Aiwa Pooamorn, John Prins, Lindsay Rabbitt, essa may ranapiri, Sudha Rao, Richard Reeve, Harry Ricketts, Alan Roddick, Derek Schulz, Di Starrenburg, Jillian Sullivan, John Summers, Jasmine Taylor, Angela Trolove, Iain Twiddy, Bryan Walpert, Susan Wardell, Rose Whitau, C.A.J. Williams, Briar Wood, Helen Yong REVIEWS Landfall Review Online: books recently reviewed Mark Broatch on This Mortal Boy by Fiona Kidman Tom Brooking on Strangers Arrive by Leonard Bell Janet Charman on Telling the Real Story by Erin Mercer Gail Pittaway on Gabriel’s Bay by Catherine Roberston Gina Cole on Free Love by Sia Figiel Michael Harlow on Athens to Aotearoa, eds. Diana Burton, Simon Perris and Jeff Tatum Emma Gattey, Awhina Clarke-Tahana and Jacinta Ruru on Juridical Encounters by Shaunnagh Dorsett Published with the assistance of Creative New Zealand Order

Bind: paperback

Pages: 208

Dimensions: 215 x 165 mm

Publication Date: 15-11-2018

Explosive new poems for election year from David Eggleton, Cilla McQueen, Vincent O’Sullivan, Tusiata Avia, Frankie McMillan, Brian Turner, Paula Green, Ian Wedde, Vaughan Rapatahana, Ria Masae, Peter Bland, Louise Wallace, Bernadette Hall, Airini Beautrais and 84 others… A poem is a vote. It chooses freedom of imagination, freedom of critical thought, freedom of speech. A collection of political poems in its very essence argues for the power of the democratic voice. Here New Zealand poets from diverse cultures, young and old, new and seasoned, from the Bay of Islands to Bluff, rally for justice on everything from a degraded environment to systemically embedded poverty; from the long, painful legacy of colonialism to explosive issues of sexual consent. Communally these writers show that political poems can be the most vivid and eloquent calls for empathy, for action and revolution, even for a simple calling to account. American poet Mark Leidner tweeted in mid-2016 that ‘A vote is a prayer with no poetry’. Here, then, are 101 secular prayers to take to the ballot box in an election year. But we think this book will continue to express the nation’s hopes every political cycle: the hope for equality and justice. Two small but potent words. 101 potent poems. Stand up, write back!

Bind: hardback

Pages: 184

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 17-04-2017

Strong Words 3 showcases the best of the best of Aotearoa New Zealand’s contemporary essays from 2021 and 2022. Selected from entries into the Landfall Essay Competition, these essays are explorative, illuminating, provocative, beautifully written and – most of all – inspiring. Strong Words 3 is packed with Aotearoa New Zealand’s most compelling new writing on contemporary issues. It is essential reading. A central part of New Zealand’s literary landscape since 1997, the annual Landfall Essay Competition is Aotearoa’s most prestigious essay writing competition. Every year these essays open up new avenues of thought, explore new ways of looking at contemporary issues and bring new narratives to the forefront. Past winners include Airini Beautrais, Ashleigh Young, Gregory O’Brien, Diana Bridge, Elizabeth Smither, Tracey Slaughter, Laurence Fearnley and Alie Benge. The biennial Strong Words series was launched in 2019 and gathers the most powerful winning, shortlisted and commended Landfall Essay Competition writing within the covers of one book. Among the rich reading featured in Strong Words 3 are the 2021 and 2022 Landfall Essay Competition winners: ‘The New Man’ by Andrew Dean, a politically and socially complex piece that traces Dean’s ancestry and examines New Zealand’s shamefully long record of anti-Semitism; and ‘Lumpectomy’ by Tina Makereti, a personal and political exploration of the body and its boundaries, and health care (and its boundaries) in Aotearoa. Other essayists featured in Strong Words 3 tackle topics such as grief, lost language, poetic childhood recollections, gender, the long aftermath of colonisation, the nature of traumatic memory, and working as a comedian while solo parenting. CONTRIBUTORS Maddie Ballard, Tīhema Baker, Rachel Buchanan, Jayne Costelloe, Lynn Davidson, Andrew Dean, Charlotte Doyle, Jessica Ducey, Susanna Elliffe, Bonnie Etherington, Norman Franke, Gill James, Claire Mabey, Tina Makereti, Alexis O’Connell, Sarah Ruigrok, Maggie Sturgess and Susan Wardell

Bind: paperback

Pages: 240

Dimensions: 165 x 215 mm

Publication Date: 26-07-2023