‘One way that poetry always lets us know that it arises from a human body is through its evocation of breath. Read a poem and air is set travelling through the body, transits from belly to throat, arches the thorax, opens spaces, and warms and cools according to pressure and pulse.’

Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025 editor Tracey Slaughter says she ‘sifted through the thousand-plus poems’ to find breath as the ‘common echo’. Issue #59 includes 141 poems by 127 established and emerging writers that breathe life into urgent contemporary concerns: mental health crises, housing inequality, environmental destruction, and political upheaval, while also celebrating our ever-present need for connection and pride. ‘Breath was invoked as a source of connection…but also as a channel of pollution.’

Featured poet Mark Prisco hones in on nature, art forms, and ugly things as key influences. He likes 'the bluntness of Anglo-Saxon aesthetics', 'hard edges' and 'language that resonates like a hammer on nail'. It took him a long time to find his own voice; shutting down his mind was something he needed to do to access his style. He manipulates punctuation and style to change how readers feel: ‘Jarring punctuation, like full-stops ‘in the wrong place’ can challenge the reader’s perception.’

While some editors call this confusing, Prisco maintains that he thinks this ‘bollocks.’ His belief that an author has no poem unless it’s on the page leads him to ‘a poem is nothing but an urge until it is delivered.’ He establishes breath as the collection’s essential metaphor for resistance and vulnerability through such explorations as ‘remembers’, where grief is a slow exhalation:

‘i remember the curtains sunstruck
tombstones, wails of black women
at the funeral. The unyielding spine
of a loved-one, & when my mother died.’

His meditation on death in 'avalanche' acknowledges the paradox of understanding yet being unable to articulate our own ending:

‘you know what dying is
but you can't explain it…life is the antagonist of death.’

But ‘The blue curtains’ explores breath's mechanical failure, the terror of being ‘gagged by an oxygen/mask’ in a hospital bed where taking a single breath becomes medicalized and constrained.

In the rest of the collection, various themes manifest. Housing is one: Éimhín O'Shea's ‘Housing First’ declares the need to ‘show me that patch of mould behind your wardrobe’. Voices in Devon Webb's ‘SWALLOW ME’ cry:

‘It's exhausting being exploited by capitalism every single day
laws built for rich men to get richer
while everyone else just chokes.’

Mental health poetry reveals systemic failures alongside personal resilience. Ami Kindler's ‘Truth’ builds devastating power through repetition: ‘I couldn't speak my truth… I tried to sing but my voice was a worn-out balloon’, cataloguing a mental health system that silences rather than heals. The climate crisis is a immediate threat.

These interconnected pressures - housing, health, and environmental collapse - overwhelm individuals to the point where Webb expresses a longing to be 'swallowed whole' by something larger, to escape the relentless struggle for basic survival. The poet continues to testify to this, ending the poem with 'I thought I was gonna be able to/finally breathe some clean air but I'm still coughing up a lung.'

Various poets offer contrasting, but complementary meditations on death and global violence. Ash Davida Jane’s ‘visitors’ presents death as an intimate companion:

‘death follows us down to the river…dips its feet in the warmth…wades out...soars above us like a kite.’

Ash Raymond James' ‘Airstrikes & Casings’ encompasses global horror, questioning ‘how can we ever be expected to trust the sky again?’ after learning ‘how small they build caskets.’ The piece ends through powerful reflection on their own privilege:

‘I make myself a coffee and forget to consider it a privilege. I walk to
the grocery store and don’t consider myself lucky. I make it home
and don’t call it an accomplishment. What an unspoken miracle it is
that I made it through another day without my heartbeat becoming a memory.’

Annabel Wilson also highlights grief and remembrance in ‘A botany of loss’.

'I pluck leaves of kawakawa…I gather rosemary
for remembrance, jasmine, daphne...
Later we take the small bundle…
down to the punga at the orchard's edge. Place it
next to the spot where we’d buried a little-finger-sized parcel…
loss we preferred not to name or discuss.’

Loss isn’t sanitised here; instead each poet finds profound humanity in acknowledging shared vulnerability to uncontrollable forces.

LGBTQIA+ voices throughout the collection navigate the complex terrain between shame and celebration. Ben O'Connell's ‘I refuse to like rainbows’ interrogates the commodification of queer identity, declaring:

‘my sexuality isn't all there is to me
and yet it is all of me !!!’

Keira Batten Coogan's ‘Reebok Club C Midrise’ celebrates embodied queerness:

‘I'm wearing the same sneakers as your boyfriend
maybe the same underwear too
i am not embarrassed.’

These voices refuse simple narratives of liberation, instead embracing the contradictions and complexities of queer existence in contemporary Aotearoa. Cultural identity emerges with similar complexity, as poets navigate spaces between languages and nations. Vaughan Rapatahana weaves te reo Māori and English honouring women who ‘salvaged me/they solaced me/they saved me,’ while Mikaela Nyman confronts casual racism from strangers who declare ‘she can't be your mum, she's got an accent.’

Three student competition winners tackle mature themes with startling sophistication. Year 13 winner Chloe Morrison-Clarke's ‘Resonance’ confronts domestic violence through fragmented imagery of ‘skin to skin’ connection turned threatening, while Year 12 winner Jasmine Liu's ‘Family tree’ explores diaspora identity through the metaphor of ‘daughters stretching back up the branches.’ Ellie Zhou, Year 11 winner, looks at childhood memories in ‘50c lemonade’, capturing both innocence and the desire for transformation.

The collection concludes by acknowledging both loss and community. Mark Houlahan's tribute to Vincent O'Sullivan (1937-2024) celebrates a poet who ‘kept control’ of his final volume ‘to the last,’ dedicated to craft throughout. Michael Steven writes about John Allison (1950-2024). ‘Allison’s poems have always been a study in erudition, in the joys of sharing knowledge and perceptions.’ Steven also honours Peter Olds (1944-2023), not only as a valued poet, but also as ‘a mate and something of an unwitting mentor.’

The substantial reviews section, covering everything from performance poetry anthologies to climate change collections, reveals a vibrant, interconnected poetry community engaged in ongoing dialogue about art's role in times of crisis.

Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025 is both an artistic achievement and a cultural document, capturing a nation thriving despite struggling to breathe. From Prisco's defiance to student voices refusing silence, these poems reject distance and detachment. They insist on the body, on breath, on documenting the reality of living through impossible times. Slaughter says ‘spirit [is still] reaching out/from grey lips’, reminding us that even when systems fail, voices endure, and poetry remains an essential act of survival and resistance.

Reviewed by Savannah Patterson