Review: Burst Kisses on the Actual Wind
Reviewed by: Kiri Piahana-Wong
Author:
Courtney Sina Meredith
Publisher:
Beatnik Publishing
ISBN:
9780995118096
Date Published:
07 April 2021
Pages:
72
Format:
Hardback
RRP:
$30.00
It’s been close to ten years since Courtney Sina Meredith’s first collection, Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick, burst onto the poetry scene in 2012, establishing her as one of the rising voices of her generation. In the interim, she also released a short story collection, Tail of the Taniwha (2016). Burst Kisses On The Actual Wind is her second collection of poetry.
Publisher Beatnik has done a superb job with the design of Meredith’s three books, which are all finely-produced hardbacks. Nice touches are Brown Girl’s use of a repeated lipstick design motif and Burst Kisses’ use of a subtle Xx design throughout.
Meredith deservedly has the reputation of being a powerhouse young writer and performer who has shone on many international stages. While Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick was a significant achievement, Burst Kisses displays her growing maturity as a writer and it is noticeably more grounded and assured than her first book.
Her poetry sometimes has a quality where its lyricism and raw power can transcend or even obscure the meaning of the poem, as the work takes flight. However, in Burst Kisses, the poetry retains her trademark sense of dynamism and strength while staying anchored. Some lines in the collection that really hit home for me:
the women are weakened by love
and the broken men carry pistols
- from Cowboy
you walk around pretending to be new
but love is a resurrectiondivinity by accident the hot matter coursing
under your skin under my skin
- from Love is a resurrection
When prayers fail
so too does the body
- from Household Gods
Perhaps Meredith’s newfound happiness in love (the book is dedicated to her wife-to-be) and the process of settling down with her own family is in part responsible for the new gravity her work possesses. The love poetry in the book also has a surprising gentle joyful humour that adds another dimension to the collection. Favourite humorous images from different poems are, “Hors d’oeuvres: Ready salted kettle chips” (from Magellanic Clouds), “Hang-the-washing-say-no-prayer” (from Burst-kisses-on-the-actual-wind) and “we make love to a mixtape of cicadas and falling stars/you have a house and a good job/my new car has very low k’s” (from meaalofa).
The book is also striking for its confident use of multiple forms (there are concrete poems, list poems, blank verse, prose poetry and more). The first poem in the collection, Could you connect me to a diverse community, makes a strong statement with its bold use of form, blacked out text and repetition. How about being a woman is another poem that plays with concrete form and repetition to good effect.
The voices adopted in the collection range from lyric verse to text-speak, which makes for an enlivening and rich reading experience. Some of the most plainly-worded poems are amongst the most powerful, and I confess to tearing up slightly at both Love is a resurrection and Avondale Heights, the first a moving depiction of the power of memory and the other an ode to family life.
Thematically, Burst Kisses is wide-ranging, however the core of the book is an in-depth examination of family, belonging, love and the complex connections between people. It was worth waiting a decade for this book. And for me personally, as well as many of Meredith’s reading base – young, or young(ish) brown women making their homes in the sprawling city of Auckland - we have a lot to strive and live for here. As Meredith writes in the final line of the collection: “The horizon is vast.” Yes it is.
Reviewed by Kiri Piahana-Wong
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