In Ten Thousand Nights, Auckland writer Yvette Thomas talks us through her world. She records the fluty praise of kōkako, the hiss of cats fighting on a roof, a mother’s song in Tagalog. She listens intently to the damaged, turning, murmuring earth—and doesn’t flinch, even ‘when there was nothing to say / but everyone was talking.’ This is a collection of hilarious love poems, gentle lyrics, raging polemics, blocky prose poems, laments and memorials, but also tyre-swinging poems, cloud poems, pepper-black night poems and neighbourly poems. Like a prickly creature curled up small, the poet looks death and worry in the face, tallies up her remaining days, and writes it all down.

Ten Thousand Nights is a light-stepping, hard-hitting, immensely appealing collection by the winner of the Caselberg International Poetry Prize.