Review: Dance-Floor Romance, by Chris Tse

Dance-Floor Romance is something of a time capsule. 

Chris Tse’s fourth poetry collection was written while he served as New Zealand’s thirteenth Poet Laureate, from 2022 to 2025. So, what was it like to spend three years as the public face of New Zealand poetry – to stand on stages, perform his work and talk about the craft throughout Aotearoa and the world? For some, the weight of that could have been paralysing. Instead, Tse took the experience and wrote a pink party-popper confection of a collection.

The dance floor is at the centre of it all, complete with sticky steps, glitter in your hair and strangers’ eyes promising the possibility of something more: ‘Sometimes the only escape I long for is a dance floor / where I can keep my body moving under flashing lights...’ 

Like all good clubs, your favourite pop girlies are invited. Tse writes in response to Madonna, Kylie, Britney and Taylor. He even has his own BRAT moment in ‘BRAT by Charli XCX by Chris Tse’: ‘I know that after strobe-light euphoria / comes a wave to shatter the illusion.’

If dance floors are the escape, then much of the collection explores what is escaped from: loneliness and longing, queer identity and history, the strangeness of being human in a digital world, and good old-fashioned heartache. The book unfolds like a perfectly curated pop playlist: it’s lively, surprising, funny and clever. There are deep cuts, like ‘Midnight, somewhere’:

‘He tried to wake me
to watch the sunset from our bed but my head was
in knots, counting down the days we had left.’

There are anthem bangers, like the titular poem:

‘I look across
the heaving dance floor & there he is—the man who
will corrupt me—cradled in light & sound.’

There are romantic ballads, like ‘Here we go’:

‘After the drought, I could not have anticipated
that watercolour stain moving through me 
so tenderly—a first responder, a hard reset—
rebooting my senses one by one.’

There’s also a healthy dose of mock self-reverence, as in ‘Number 13’: ‘Hear me: I am the Poet Laureate & I / approve this message!’

Tse experiments with form and draws inspiration from many artists, yet his voice and playfulness make every poem – even ones stitched together from songs – uniquely his own. Each piece packages depth in sugary beats, at one point turning to one of the great dance-cry anthems in history:

‘So I listen to Robyn’s 
‘Dancing On My Own’ for the thousandth time to feel something
deeply—to unearth a memory loaded with the most powerful 
emotion that will transform my simple words into a paean to 
our shared lives.’

The sequencing feels as considered as an album’s track list. There’s a full experience here of all the emotions that send humans dancing into the night, then philosophising in dark club corners at 3am. The result is a deeply personal collection very much of its moment: a record of what was listened to, worried about, longed for and lived through.

This collection should come with a warning: if you start, you won’t stop – you’ll want to dance through it in one night. But it’s perhaps worth considering Tse’s words from ‘2024 & Other Poems’:

‘Slow down, the other me told me.
Everything ends as fast as the urge 
for it to begin.’

Like any great pop song, there is so much to revel in and linger over between the line breaks of Dance-Floor Romance. Expect to want to dance and cry and laugh – and when you get to the end, do it all again.