Party Legend
Author:
Sam Duckor-Jones
Publisher:
Victoria University Press
ISBN:
9781776564231
Date Published:
10 June 2021
Pages:
96
Format:
Paperback
RRP:
$25.00
Excuse the mess
I wasn’t expecting guests
But that’s another joke
I expect you
always
Sam Duckor Jones’s first poetry collection was a tour of small towns, overgrown lawns, and giant clay men. In Party Legend he turns once again to questions of existence but at an even bigger scale. These are poems about creation, God, intimacy, the surreality of political rhetoric, misunderstandings at the supermarket — and they are fearless in form and address. Though Party Legend is often wildly funny, it is also, in its Duckor-Jonesian way, tender-hearted and consoling.
'Blending outrageous tales and borrowed moments with surprising results, Party Legend is the work of a poet unafraid to get a little weird to show us a good time. I am utterly bewitched by this sexy, playful and curious book.' —Chris Tse
‘Gorgeous and contrary.’ —Jenny Bornholdt
‘Sex and longing, tenderness and pain, quest and invention, togetherness and solitude: if that’s not the queer experience, I don’t know what is.’ —Kerry Donovan Brown
‘Bloody fantastic.’ —John Campbell
Cover illustration: Arrangement, Mel Odom, 1979
Sam Duckor-Jones is a sculptor and poet. In 2017 he won the Biggs Poetry Prize from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University of Wellington. His first book was People from the Pit Stand Up (VUP, 2018).
See Publisher’s Website
Reviews, interviews, etc.
Radio NZ: reviewed by Claire Mabey
Piripai, Leila Lees (Lasavia Publishing)
North & South (August issue, p. 92) review by Paul Little: “Elegantly laid out and typeset, this is a slim volume of prose poetry celebrating and structured around 26 birds … Seldom has the experience of birdwatching – if that’s not too lowly a label for what is described here – been so meticulously transferred to the page. … In Lees’ hands, the language also takes flight.”
NZ Poetry Shelf review by Paula Green
