Review: Hungus, by Amber Esau

It's a 'Mantis-eat-Mantis world,' asserts Amber Esau in the first poem of her debut collection, Hungus. The cover art, by Katrina Steak, depicts a cartoonish female Mantis, all blinged-up, crouched over holding an outsize machete resembling a pirate's cutlass, and looking like a creature not to be messed with – looking like a content warning. This big, bold collection confirms Esau, a New Zealand-born Samoan-Māori-Irish poet, as a part of a rainbow of poetry divas – others include Courtney Sina Meredith, Tayi Tibble, essa may ranapiri and Hera Lindsay Bird – who have emerged over the past decade or so to help reset the global compass for poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand.

In Hungus, the Mantis may or may not be 'hungus' (a teen-slang abbreviation of humongous, meaning outsize, awesome,exaggerated, as well as implying hunger, greed, desire), but the pages positively swarm with accounts of this humanoid insect figure, who we understand to be a poetic persona, an alter ego, a double – and also an urban legend, a prankster, a disruptor. In one poem, 'A gossip of aunties invites the Mantis to sit with them'; in another, the Mantis 'moans into the mic'; and in a third, the Mantis 'sits among the possums, strokes/ their fur .../ ... before cracking/ the window and sending the starving possums in.' The poem sequence 'The Mantis Makeki' travels to Samoa and visits an island market, with its tents, a 'ratty blue marquee' 'fish stalls' and 'food trucks', and the reassuring ritual of 'hot dogs dipped in Watties'.

Masquerade, and a succession of fictional or semi-autobiographical selves all in some measure phantasmagorically monstrous, is the name of the game in Hungus. These poems are at once shrewdly observant and comically contrarian as they deliver not only versions of the devious Mantis, but also a 'many-headed ... Beauty Queen', a disputatious 'Angel', 'multi-faced atua', and a portrait in a poem called 'Kong' of Queen Kong, able to 'swing round the building/ oiled with the pull/ of the rowdiest pole dancer.'

Here, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, with its 'flags of used-car / dealerships, tarnished garages, the yolky Baby Factory; squiggled walls along train lines', its spaghetti junctions and giant box stores and endless sprawl, is a melting pot of scenarios. At times the city is a place of putrefaction, emblematic of cultural stress-points, as at the amusement park of South Auckland's Rainbow's End where the poet's relatives, marking the death of a family member with a boisterous Pasifika-style wake, are snubbed and frowned on: the sun is 'a rotting orange/ in the corner of a fogged fruit drawer', while 'people around us/ cleared their throats and stood rigid like dried/ paintbrushes.' On another occasion, a rolling power black-out creates a shadow-play in the local big box store out West: 'some people are lost/ patting down the shelves to find their way/ out.' More obvious forms of estrangement include being part of the much-put-upon precariat, subject to harassment, in the poem, 'Customer Service'; and the street theatre of CBD rough sleepers in 'Housekeeping': 'Headlights slash a woman folding blankets/ onto cardboard, while her partner sweeps dust/ from their patch of path.' 

Other poems recall a West Auckland childhood: 'on the deck, she holds the View-Master she got for her sixth Christmas /up to the sky and turns through each moon on the wheel' – or track personal relationships: 'Let this love/ last as long as a switchboard face sizzles in the rain/ then short circuits everyone else's building' – or skewer a bothersome acquaintance when out nightclubbing: 'The gig inside blinks loudly when the door/ swings open for ol' mate to stumble towards us/ gravel crunching under his steps./ The wind opening like a bag of chips.' And then there are the ubiquitous orange road cones: 'At night, the fluorotrianges multiply/ adorning the hills in one long, thrown-back cackle.'

Esau's poems muse on glut, abundance, consumption and poverty – on the haves and the have-nots – in what Courtney Sina Meredith has dubbed contemporary 'urbanesia': the Pasifika diaspora. And they also muse on the whole process of creative writing. Hungus delivers a poetry of artful hoaxes, sly jokes, deliberate misdirections, faux answers and stroppy questions. The poems often deliberately undermine themselves, and meaning wobbles off-kilter, pulling the reader, or listener, along. As the poet points out in 'Ulo Bolos Redux': 'What are words but lies? What are lies but to rest presently upon anything/ that will hold you until it crumbles.' Thus consumerism's promises end in buyer's remorse: in bitterness, sarcasm, scepticism.

Hungus incorporates elements of Polynesian myth, traditional fairy tales, and the folk-trickster's tall stories. It also incorporates the relentlessly evolving jargon of social media, the cadences of hip-hop and rap vibes, and the flippancy of comic-book speech-bubble quotes. These poems feel adrenalised by a world where the digital realm, with its speed, glitches and clickbait – the internet's abundance of misinformation and false witness and conflicting advice – increasingly undermines trust and launches tail-spins of chaos and paranoia.

In Hungus, poem titles are often ciphers or insider-jokes, unreadable signposts; their slangy code-speak is a form of magical transference, teasing out concepts such as 'chatbot'. 'cyborg' and sentient AI. Or else the neologisms, the elided or shuffled phrases – 'Potentrify', 'A Ssim', 'Quickocrisy' – imply an online dystopia ruled over by the tech bros, where meanings are slippery and destabilised and even hallucinatory. In her handful of 'erasure' poems, Esau turns literature into a QR code, visually resembling the cabalistic doodles of obscure cargo cults. These are 'protest poems', where the black felt-tip cancellations and isolated words are revolutionary slogans as much as erasures.

At this point in the twenty-first century, people without homes, without phones, without internet access, have been marginalised by corporate ideology into non-people, analogue ghosts. Esau represents barriers to participation in today's civic society via a poetic imagery of streaked and smeared and smashed screens, or squashed flat KFC packs, or else as tightly wrapped cling-film and masking-tape packages that need unpicking. In part her poetry, with its social justice instincts, is about our surveillance society and the constant sense of being stalked by online shadows. As she writes in 'Channels', it's 'like we are all viewing/ our being viewed.' Granular and down with the nitty-gritty, poem after poem in Hungus offers a calculated performative rejection of behaviour management, corporate cheerleading and ethnological anxiety in favour of self-assertion – as in the optimism of: 'she will glow like an uninhibited lighter held up to the sky at a stadium/ concert.'

The ambition of Pasifika artists, poets and writers, Albert Wendt has written, should be not to remain content with nostalgic or pre-colonial versions of Oceania, but to strive to create 'a new Oceania', here in the Moana Nui. Esau's Hungus offers ultimately a paper-chase of pay-and-display poems sourced from this 'new Oceania', which she terms, using a hybrid of Samoan and Māori te reo, 'te moana fou'. In Hungus, the poems loop across the South Pacific as dense force-fields of linguistic virtuosity, incorporating many tonal registers and energised as if electrified by the brilliant lightning of ocean storms.

Hungus by Amber Esau will be launched on Thursday 26 March at 6pm at Rocketman bar. Join us to celebrate a dazzling new voice in New Zealand poetry, with words from Courtney Sina Meredith. We’ll have three amazing artists, including cover artist Katrina Steak, in the house with us for mini makeki styles. Rocketman bar, 8 Roukai Lane, Auckland Central. Free entry – all welcome!

David Eggleton is a writer of Rotuman, Tongan and Palangi ancestry. His books include The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, published by Otago University Press in 2022, and Lifting the Island: Poems, published by Red Hen Press in the USA in 2025. He lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin.