Poetry by Rogelio Guedea With English translations by Roger Hickin • New collection from award-winning poet and novelist • Spanish / English bilingual poetry • Themes of love, loss, intimacy and estrangement In Rogelio Guedea’s bold new poetry collection, O me voy o te vas / One of us must go (with English translations by Roger Hickin), love is a powerful magnet that attracts and repels in equal measure. In language both lyrical and spare, Guedea examines what it means to share one’s life with another person and questions whether – and how – love can survive reality’s steady tap-drip repetitions. This is the mesmerising tale of two people who stumble over one another time and time again, yet whose every word and action adds another stitch to a close, personal tapestry of memories and familiarity. Unashamedly domestic, this collection captures every kind of tenderness felt in an intimately involved life. O me voy o te vas / One of us must go is a true love story, a chronicle of romantic survivalism. To write against your love is to write about your love: is to love you another way, is to love you in every way. – XXVIII

Bind: paperback

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 20-09-2022

Bryan Walpert’s fourth collection of lyric poems ranges in its focus from flowers to infinities, from laundry to eternity, but is founded most fully on what it is to move into middle age – to wait still for life’s promised brass band to arrive. Whether writing from the perspective of a parent watching childhood slip away or ventriloquising the 17th-century scientific language of Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle to craft surprising love poems, he engages the world with a keen and often witty perception, a deft juggling of the sentence, and a sense of wonder. Frequently playful in approach, the poems are always serious in their engagement with the bewildering nature of time passing – of growing up, and growing old. AUTHOR Bryan Walpert is the author of three previous collections of poetry – Etymology, A History of Glass and most recently Native Bird. He is also the author of a novella, Late Sonata, winner of the Seizure Viva La Novella prize; a collection of short fiction, Ephraim’s Eyes; and two scholarly books: Poetry and Mindfulness: Interruption to a Journey, and Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry. His work has appeared in New Zealand, Australia, the UK, the US and Canada, and has been recognised by the Montreal International Poetry Award, the New Zealand International Poetry Competition and the James Wright Poetry Award (US). He is a professor in creative writing at Massey University, Auckland. More on Bryan can be found at bryanwalpert.com.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 96

Dimensions: 148 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 01-05-2021

The Sets returns again and again to the ever-present sea – as a metaphor, a mirror, a companion and an otherworld that contains our dreams and nightmares. Dunedin poet Victor Billot finds in the South Pacific Ocean an oracle of the future and a keeper of our histories. The Sets begins with reflections on the domestic world and the fragility of the family and personal relationships that sustain us, the necessity and refuge of love, and the sometimes catastrophic effects of failure in these relationships. The collection then shifts towards political and social satire, punching out mashups of fake news and rogue algorithms that mix mordant wit with compressed rage at the banality of humanity’s descent towards oblivion. From the poet’s coastal childhood to the turbulent post-1980s experiences of his generation, we end with a series of meditations on the ocean as a site of the brutality of globalised capitalism, and a representation of the complex and difficult worlds we carry within us. In love with language, entangled in the world, Victor Billot’s poetry draws on postpunk music and spoken word performance to create a panoramic extravaganza firing on all cylinders. He has his finger right on the zeitgeist, and accurately portrays the spirit of our times for New Zealanders … a very gifted poet who deserves to be widely read. – Laura Solomon, New Zealand Poetry Yearbook 2018 Victor Billot is the real deal … his poems are tough and tender and wise. – Michael Steven, author of Walking to Jutland Street and The Lifers This fellow Billot ought to be recognised as New Zealand’s demi-official poet laureate. – Steve Braunias, editor of Reading Room

Bind: paperback

Pages: 118

Dimensions: 130 x 198 mm

Publication Date: 05-01-2021

What is invariably terrific in Eggleton’s poetry is not only the relish of his attack, but the flash of lyric underwing colour as he dives on his prey. – IAN WEDDE David Eggleton, Poet Laureate of Aotearoa 2019–21, has published nine poetry collections, and now, finally, comes a ‘Best Of ’. The Wilder Years: Selected Poems is a hardback compendium of the poet’s own selection from 35 years of published work, together with a handful of new poems. Cover art by Nigel Brown. About David Eggleton’s poetry: Eggleton’s word-blasts remain consistently gratifying. His poetry’s ... endlessly imaginative, it’s funny, [and] intellectually rewarding … Every poem is a snapshot of the culture in action. – NICK ASCROFT Vital, elastic, expertly handled language in a Pacific voice of cultural and musical sensibility, poetry to be spoken aloud or in-the-mind. – CILLA McQUEEN … vivid, fizzy and smart. – GRANT SMITHIES

Bind: hardback

Pages: 314

Dimensions: 220 x 170 mm

Publication Date: 25-03-2021

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

The title of James Norcliffe’s tenth poetry collection points deftly to the way it conveys big emotions without cracking a smile or shedding a tear. In Deadpan, Norcliffe writes in an alert, compassionate yet sceptical voice. The book’s first section, ‘Poor Yorick’, shares the thoughts of an introspective narrator as he contends with the travails of later life. ‘In his hospital pyjamas’, Yorick is by turns cheerful and beset by loss, laughing and weeping, comparing the stages of life (and death). The following sections – ‘Scan’, ‘Trumpet Vine’, ‘Telegraph Road’ and ‘Travellers in a small Ford’ – reach around to mine experience in a world where ‘nothing lasts’; not childhood, place nor identity. An appropriate response to this ephemeral world is to embrace ambiguity, uncertainty, absurdity and surrealism. ‘Deadpan,’ writes the author in his introductory essay, ‘is the porter in Macbeth pausing to take a piss while there is that urgent banging at the gate. It is Buster Keaton standing unmoved as the building crashes down on top of him. It is my poker-faced Yorkshire grandfather playing two little dicky birds sitting on the wall.’ These poems are concise and contained, using supple, precise language and a gleam of dry and mordant wit. Deadpan is the work of a mature and technically astute poet who is one of New Zealand’s leading writers.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 100

Dimensions: 165 x 235 x 10 mm

Are you fed up with that one person who posts way too much personal info on social media? Are you worried your friend is taking the hipster look too far but don’t know how to tell them? Do you need a poem for when your satnav crashes and you start catastrophising that you’ll never make it home again? Yes? Then Poetry for Millennials is the answer to all your woes, offering poetry from some of our greatest literary figures as an antidote to help laugh off the most common millennial problems. From the joys of internet dating and house-shares to digital detoxing and growing up, this book will help make you more resilient to what’s thrown your way and show the previous generations that you definitely aren’t a snowflake *after wiping away your tears*.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 128

Dimensions: 127 x 170 mm

Publication Date: 08-08-2019

A mysterious doppelgänger sister, a newborn baby, a boy in a mural, a detective, a former lover, a student stalker … are they real or imagined? Building on Diane Brown’s tradition of extended poetic narratives, Every Now and Then I Have Another Child is an inventive and heartfelt meditation on motherhood, the creative impulse and the blurred line between imagination and reality. This delightful, evocative poetic narrative wafts between the truly surreal and the ‘everyday’ absurd.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 164

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

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

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