A journey through and declaration of how creativity with words can empower every individual. Each poem explores the wonders of rhythm and rhyme with a hip hop influence in a way that stirs the imagination. Kimba shares experiences and ideas that cause joy, laughter, reflection and outright fun.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 160

Dimensions: 129 x 198 mm

Publication Date: 01-07-2022

Far from dead, our ghosts live within us always … Poet Siobhan Harvey’s latest collection is about migration, outcasts, the search for home, and the ghosts we live with, including the ones who occupy our memories, ancestries and stories. It begins in a contemporary inner-city suburb where a poet starts to chart the regeneration she witnesses, its difficulties and opportunities. Along the way, the collection moves across time-zones, oceans and continents, breaking down personal and political walls, and unleashing ghosts everywhere. Ultimately, Ghosts is a work concerned with dislocation, rejection, homelessness, family trauma and how we can give voice to the lost souls inside us all.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 112

Dimensions: 230 x 150 mm

Somewhere a cleaner Poems by cleaners from around New Zealand During the Covid-19 pandemic, we’ve all been thinking about essential services. Including cleaning. Cleaning is universal. It’s steeped in tradition and culture. It’s essential, it’s ordinary and it’s surprisingly poetic. Somewhere a cleaner captures the spirit, the highs and the lows, of this occupation that often falls below the radar. The poems range across hospitals, offices, marae, clocks, schools, boat hulls, sneakers and more. The poets themselves, a mix of novice and established writers, are equally diverse. Through songs, rhymes, deeply insightful poems and poignant small stories, this anthology gives a voice to a profession both invisible and indispensable. Endorsement: Having walked the corridors of hospitals for more than a few years, I can tell you that cleaners can sometimes be the best doctors of all. And now I find they can write some great poems too. This book is wonderfully democratic. The art here is in the work done before and beyond the writing. The endless picking up, mopping, smoothing and shining. And always, it seems, for someone else. These are poems with strong forearms. My deepest congratulations to every poet in this collection – and my long overdue thanks. I will never walk on a neatly mopped floor again. - Glenn Colquhoun

Bind: paperback

Pages: 174

Dimensions: 129 x 198 mm

Publication Date: 29-11-2020

A collection of contemporary creative writing from emerging and celebrated writers. In A Vase and a Vast Sea, poetry and prose rustle against the window, scatter palm fronds across the road and sneak off to the movies on a Tuesday. There are moments of nostalgia blended with dangerous undercurrents and domestic life. This collection is a reunion of writers such as Renée, Maggie Rainey-Smith, Barbara Else, Rata Gordon, Tim Jones, Anahera Gildea, and Adrienne Jansen, and is an essential keepsake of New Zealand literature and a much-loved writing course.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 146

Dimensions: 125 x 186 mm

Publication Date: 05-10-2020

"The work of a poet who knows how important people and places are… I kept thinking, too, about life’s voyagings. I found the whole very affecting — touching, tender, rueful at times… And all the more impressive for being unsentimental." - Brian Turner We are unmoored by circumstances that set us adrift from our normal lives into unknown waters. The poems in this debut collection range from the luxury of certainty, through the loss of a partner, to establishing a new life in a different part of the country. But nothing is secure, and a global pandemic again threatens to disrupt the familiar. Through it all, there is reassurance in recognising the perfection in arising and passing away. About the author: Bridget Auchmuty was born in Britain in 1951, came to New Zealand to visit her sister, and never went home. She spent more than thirty years in the Nelson region, where she and her partner lived on ten acres in the Motueka Valley. After his death, she shifted to the Ida Valley in Central Otago, where she lives in a yurt. The core of this collection formed one component of the author’s Master’s degree in Creative Writing at Massey University, and several of the poems have appeared in prominent poetry journals.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 88

Dimensions: 160 x 235 mm

Publication Date: 01-10-2020

Oh Christ, a bloody ½ witted student, for purposes of an essay, has just come in to ask me what I and Baxter write verse for, and if we mean what we say, or is there something deeper; could we write better verse in England, or here; or do the critics and professors just read a lot into what’s said that isn’t there? So much. And I have been very rude indeed. – Letter to John Reece Cole, 16 August 1949 Nothing about this excerpt from a letter by Denis Glover will surprise anyone who knows him by reputation. He – and his letters – could be witty, intelligent, alarmingly frank and frequently highly entertaining. A widely admired poet, honoured naval commander, gifted printer and typographer, Denis Glover was founder of the Caxton Press in Christchurch. For 15 years from 1935 he directed a publishing programme that did much to define New Zealand literature for its day, and for much of the rest of the century. His literary work was suspended for war service in the New Zealand Division of the Royal Navy, during which he earned a DSC for his activities in the Normandy landings. But he was also a serial philanderer and prodigious drinker, and his private life increasingly disintegrated around him, more and more publicly. And yet his energy as a correspondent appeared never to wane, and almost to the end he confided openly, prolifically and entertainingly to hundreds of acquaintances and confidants. In this magnificent volume Sarah Shieff presents around 500 of Glover’s letters to around 110 people, drawn from an archive of nearly 3000 letters to over 430 recipients. Many now recall Glover as little more than a misogynistic old fart, a court jester. These letters should give readers the opportunity to revise – or at least complicate – those dismissive categorisations.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 800

Dimensions: 230 x 150 mm

One of New Zealand’s most versatile writers, Fiona Farrell has published four collections of poetry over 25 years, from Cutting Out (1987) to The Broken Book (2011). Noun, verbs, etc. collects the best work from these books, and intersperses them with other poems thus far ‘uncollected’. The themes are wide ranging: political and personal, regional and global, including love and birth and death, war and emigration, history and landscape. The poems mix lyricism with the flat and plainspoken mode of Kiwi vernacular; they channel voices infrequently heard in poetry in traditional song and ballad forms. They are well crafted but unpretentious, jokey yet illuminating, self-deprecating but wise, sad and funny and deeply human. Fiona Farrell’s poems look light and lyrical and tidy on the page, which is the way they manage the storms of feeling that race along their lines. These are poems that know how much we yearn for terra firma yet how often we must deal with broken things. They care about family. They speak against injustice. They also know how to rescue the heart and let it sing. – Bill Manhire

Bind: hardback

Pages: 212

Dimensions: 130 x 198 mm

Publication Date: 29-10-2020

The poems in Sinking Lessons portray the vitality of a world full of things and beings we too often disregard, using language that vibrates in harmony with the lively tales it tells – from small, everyday events to stories of shipwrecks and strandings, resurrections and reanimations, arctic adventures and descents into the underworld. The cast of characters includes members of the poet’s family alongside heroes from myth and literature, such as Orpheus, Scheherazade and Frankenstein’s Creature. And crowding in upon these, at all times, a multitude of non-human protagonists: sun and stars, wind and water, mud and sand, body fluids, decaying matter, chemicals organic and inorganic, and a great many fishes and birds and beasts. Sinking Lessons is the first collection of poetry from Philip Armstrong, winner of the 2019 Kathleen Grattan Poetry Award.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 54

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 07-08-2020

One of New Zealand’s most prominent, well-loved and accessible poets Kevin Ireland’s words pop like seaweed pods, whether he is: honouring friendships — making sourdough bread — grinning at the weather gods — wondering why he slept in — marvelling at the miracle of a shower — giving advice to writers — analysing chance remarks and philosophical paradoxes — celebrating the benefits of a failing memory — circumnavigating childhood, ageing and death … or just having fun, which he does refreshingly often. Shape of the Heart sparkles with poems that take us from brain to heart, sometimes detouring to unexpected places (such as the belly button), but most often in a direct and delightful line.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 64

Dimensions: 140 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 12-05-2020

From Sean Macgregor's lounge occupied by stoned youths, to three bank robbers en route to the Penrose ANZ, Michael Steven's second collection presents his clear, clean vision of 'the lifers' who inhabit these islands and beyond.A generation's subterranean memories of post-Rogernomics New Zealand are a linking thread, in the decades straddling the millennium, while other poems echo with the ghostly voices of the dead, disappeared and forgotten. Steven's writing neither patronises nor romanticises in its intricate depictions of small worlds of violence, despair, love and struggle. Always it refers back to the redemption of human connection as its magnetic pole.Dawn is a fire show of gold and hot white, blasting the darkness off the isthmus.In two hours, I will land in your city.I am made of atoms and they are dancing.

Pages: 92

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 01-03-2020