Author: Schaeffer Lemalu Publisher: Compound Press

The debut collection from a great poet and artist gone too soon. His word is among us, travelling still, full of candour, humility, a loving regard for detail. Includes an introduction by renowned US poet Donald Revell.

28 April 2024

Author: Kiri Piahana-Wong Publisher: Anahera Press

Tidelines interweaves the poet's own life with the tragic story of Hinerangi, who lived at Karekare in the distant past. These are poems of Auckland's west coast, reflecting the steady rhythms of daily existence, alongside grief, mental unwellness, disintegration and resolution.

23 April 2024

Editors: David Eggleton, Vaughan Rapatahana, and Mere Taito Publisher: Massey University Press

To write poetry in New Zealand as a Pacific migrant is an act of wayfinding, a creative process of discovery and negotiation between cultural spaces. This collection of 137 poems by 89 Aotearoa-based Pacific poets explores that navigation.Deep and rich, like Moana Oceania itself, it shows Pasifika poetry to be in a constant state of 'old and new', of haharagi and lelea' mafua, a lively and evolving continuum.

11 April 2024

Author: Peter Rawnsley Publisher: Cuba Press

Peter Rawnsley writes of movement even as his own world becomes increasingly still. He is acutely aware of the natural world around him - its softness and light as well as its brutality - from Karehana Bay to Castlepoint to Tijuana, and of his own place in it. He nods to the inevitable passing of time, but importantly there is still time, and that's something he's grateful for. He feels blessed to be here. Stones and Kisses is a tender, reflective and playful collection from one of Aotearoa's best-kept secrets.

1 April 2024

Author: Lee Murray Publisher: Cuba Press

Wellington, 1923, and a sixty-year-old woman hangs herself in a scullery; ten years later another woman 'falls' from the second floor of a Taranaki tobacconist; soon afterwards a young mother in Taumarunui slices the throat of her newborn with a cleaver. All are women of the Chinese diaspora, who came to Aotearoa for a new life and suffered isolation and prejudice in silence. Chinese Pakeha writer Lee Murray has taken the nine-tailed fox spirit huli jing as her narrator to inhabit the skulls of these women and others like them and tell their stories.

1 April 2024

Author: Iona Winter Publisher: Elixir & Star Press

In the shape of his hand lay a river is Iona Winter's fourth collection, and part of a body of work written after her son, prolific musician, Reuben Winter took his life. Here, through a poetic lens, she asks unanswerable questions, while embodying a multiplicity of emotions, and we are called to look at the ineffable absence of a beloved child. Winter's work around suicide bereavement and grief is honest, powerful and fearless, reminding us that love and pain, must always coexist. Iona Winter perfectly captures the pain and confusion that is grief. I often felt like these poems were speaking directly to my personal experience.

30 March 2024

Author: Dr Tracey Slaughter Publisher: Massey University Press

For the 2024 edition of the Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, editor Tracey Slaughter has once again hit the zeitgeist in her selection of 101 new poems from an exhaustive submission process. Another packed issue, #58 showcases the raw and the vital - including from this year's featured poet, Carin Smeaton - and a blistering introduction from Slaughter herself. In addition there are excellent reviews of a crop of recent poetry books. With work by both established and emerging New Zealand poets, the Yearbook is essential reading for all poetry fans.

19 March 2024

Author: Stacey Teague Publisher: Te Herenga Waka University Press

In Plastic, Stacey Teague reaches beyond the frame of her known world to find a way back to te ao Maori. Hers is a complicated, joyful route, full of conversations with ancestors, old places and herself. In form these poems range from plain-speaking prose and concrete poetry to odes and spells; in mood they are just as restless, taking in those times when life feels as big as a movie screen and times when it is more like 'a loose stone to kick down the path'. Gathered here are names that travel through time, failed photos of the moon, and love like a feather in the throat.

14 March 2024

Author: Airini Beautrais Publisher: Te Herenga Waka Press

In The Beautiful Afternoon, award-winning poet and short-story writer Airini Beautrais plumbs history, literature, Star Wars, sea hags, beauty products, tarot, swimwear, environmentalism and pole dancing to deliver a virtuoso inquiry into how we become, and change, who we are. Beautrais surveys the many influences on her life, from Lord Byron and Dante to Dolly magazine and 90s R&B, with intense curiosity and a fierce intelligence. Whether saving the planet in her Quaker childhood and activist youth, surviving the lonely years of early motherhood, or confronting the fears and freedoms of midlife - in which she writes about the body becoming a poem and human touch beginning to feel safe again

14 March 2024

Author: Mason Gilbert Publisher: Mason Gilbert

The Jellyfish is a collection of personal poems, showing the struggles of everyday life as a mentally ill queer person. Through love and hardship, art can be found and made, an outlet for those in need who have found themselves rejected by the ones in power. See the world through the spectacle of a young woman, find the anger and pain that sits under the skin and hides in the pages.

10 February 2024

Author: Sylvan Spring. Publisher: Te Herenga Waka University Press

In their generous and often euphoric first book, Sylvan Spring is constantly and irresistibly in motion. These are poems for the sad bitches, the silly billys, the divine transsexuals, the girls who were first to get piercings not in their ears, the ones who dream of dissolving into a river, the Cocteau Twins obsessives, the average bros, the immaculate twinks, the retired popstars turned chicken farmers, and fans of 2001 masterpiece Charlie's Angels.

8 February 2024

Author: Editorial Team at Steele Roberts Publisher: Steele Roberts Aotearoa Ltd

The 1970s saw unprecedented numbers of people take to the streets to campaign for civil liberties, environmental issues, gay rights, housing, Maori land and language, peace, women's rights, worker's wages and conditions - and to end apartheid, racism and war.

5 January 2024

Author: Te Awhina Rangimarie Arahanga Publisher: Steele Roberts Aotearoa Ltd

Te Awhina Rangimarie Arahanga’s second book follows Darkness in Light (2014) and sets stories beside fresh, tasty poems. These works (some conceived during Covid lockdowns and others influenced by seismic shocks) are often spiced with humour and always come from a place of aroha — never far from ocean and mountain.

5 January 2024

Author: Tusiata Avia. Publisher: Te Herenga Waka University Press.

Tusiata Avia, author of Ockham-award-winning The Savage Coloniser Book, returns with a brilliant and eviscerating work. These are poems of defiance, confrontation, consolation, satire, sorrow and fury.

09 November 2023

Editors: Carrie Rudzinski and Grace Iwashita-Taylor. Publisher: Auckland University Press.

Rapture offers a snapshot of contemporary performance poetry in Aotearoa.

09 November 2023

Authors: Various. Publisher: Huia Publishers.

Here are the best short fiction stories, short non-fiction pieces and poetry from the Pikihuia Awards for Māori writers 2023 as judged by Emma Espiner, Carol Hirschfeld, Maiki Sherman, Mike Ross, Hēmi Kelly and Robert Sullivan. This competition, run by the Māori Literature Trust and Huia Publishers, is held every two years to promote Māori writers and their work.

31 October 2023

Editor: Anne Kennedy. Publisher: Auckland University Press.

Anne Kennedy brings together for the first time a selection of over 200 poems from Aotearoa to learn by heart – whakataukī and odes, poems of love and of nature, of whānau, history and politics.

19 October 2023

Author: Kerrin P. Sharpe. Publisher: Te Herenga Waka University Press.

Hoof by Kerrin P. Sharpe arrives with new urgency and longing, an invitation to travel by train through the poet’s world. The trains that begin each of the three sections in the book give the reader time to stop and stare.

12 October 2023

Authors: Catherine Bagnall and L. Jane Sayle. Publisher: Massey University Press.

Hot on the heels of their acclaimed 2021 collaboration On We Go, artist Catherine Bagnall and poet Jane Sayle return with another collection of water colours and poems inspired by their contemplation of nature within the context of the feminine sublime. In the Temple maintains a focus on ecological thinking, exploring intense personal connections with the natural world.

12 October 2023

Author: Dani Yourukova. Publisher: Auckland University Press.

An arresting first collection of poetry, in which Dani Yourukova drags Plato’s Symposium to Aotearoa in 2023.

12 October 2023