Show You're Working Out

What do you get if you cross Pākehā stories from the rural south of Te Waipounamu with scissors, glue and a want to reveal structural and personal violences of settler colonisation? It’s not a joke but some parts of liz breslin’s third full length collection, show you’re working out, are funny.

The play on ‘your’/’you’re’ destabilises a singular sense of story - showing that you’re working out is what it can feel important to do in a relationship, or a small community, when you want to be accepted. And ‘show your working out’ is what maths exams at school sometimes say. Put marks on the page to signify the thinking that you have done.

liz’s experimental and engaging marks on the pages of this collection include poems about complicity, crocs, cycling, DIY, domestic abuse, the queerness of hands, Pride, Pilates, needlework, what gets called nature, reality tv, scissoring, sharks, Sharon from the Speight’s ads, wellness culture and white supremacy.