The Sets returns again and again to the ever-present sea – as a metaphor, a mirror, a companion and an otherworld that contains our dreams and nightmares. Dunedin poet Victor Billot finds in the South Pacific Ocean an oracle of the future and a keeper of our histories. The Sets begins with reflections on the domestic world and the fragility of the family and personal relationships that sustain us, the necessity and refuge of love, and the sometimes catastrophic effects of failure in these relationships. The collection then shifts towards political and social satire, punching out mashups of fake news and rogue algorithms that mix mordant wit with compressed rage at the banality of humanity’s descent towards oblivion. From the poet’s coastal childhood to the turbulent post-1980s experiences of his generation, we end with a series of meditations on the ocean as a site of the brutality of globalised capitalism, and a representation of the complex and difficult worlds we carry within us. In love with language, entangled in the world, Victor Billot’s poetry draws on postpunk music and spoken word performance to create a panoramic extravaganza firing on all cylinders. He has his finger right on the zeitgeist, and accurately portrays the spirit of our times for New Zealanders … a very gifted poet who deserves to be widely read. – Laura Solomon, New Zealand Poetry Yearbook 2018 Victor Billot is the real deal … his poems are tough and tender and wise. – Michael Steven, author of Walking to Jutland Street and The Lifers This fellow Billot ought to be recognised as New Zealand’s demi-official poet laureate. – Steve Braunias, editor of Reading Room

Bind: paperback

Pages: 118

Dimensions: 130 x 198 mm

Publication Date: 05-01-2021

The title of James Norcliffe’s tenth poetry collection points deftly to the way it conveys big emotions without cracking a smile or shedding a tear. In Deadpan, Norcliffe writes in an alert, compassionate yet sceptical voice. The book’s first section, ‘Poor Yorick’, shares the thoughts of an introspective narrator as he contends with the travails of later life. ‘In his hospital pyjamas’, Yorick is by turns cheerful and beset by loss, laughing and weeping, comparing the stages of life (and death). The following sections – ‘Scan’, ‘Trumpet Vine’, ‘Telegraph Road’ and ‘Travellers in a small Ford’ – reach around to mine experience in a world where ‘nothing lasts’; not childhood, place nor identity. An appropriate response to this ephemeral world is to embrace ambiguity, uncertainty, absurdity and surrealism. ‘Deadpan,’ writes the author in his introductory essay, ‘is the porter in Macbeth pausing to take a piss while there is that urgent banging at the gate. It is Buster Keaton standing unmoved as the building crashes down on top of him. It is my poker-faced Yorkshire grandfather playing two little dicky birds sitting on the wall.’ These poems are concise and contained, using supple, precise language and a gleam of dry and mordant wit. Deadpan is the work of a mature and technically astute poet who is one of New Zealand’s leading writers.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 100

Dimensions: 165 x 235 x 10 mm

To the Occupant takes the everyday and transforms it into something fine and precious and enduring. With an unsparing attention, Emma Neale creates shape-shifting poems that confound prejudices and subvert expectations. Displaying verve and confidence, her poetry is filled with musicality and dynamic language, always observant to the world and its details. The striking imagery and emotional range of her work never veer into sentimentality. These poems engage with the full spectrum of human emotion and experience, the hauntings of history, the cold hand of social inequality, and the long contrail of intimate cruelties. They challenge the open and latent violence of contemporary life, from refugee crises to rape, poverty and mental illness to climate change, while revealing the extraordinary in the everyday, where a child’s-eye view of the world can witness the wonder of the new or the shadow of darkness. Whimiscal typographical experiments and prose poems sit next to reimagined fables (the Big Bad Wolf repurposed as inner demon), deliciously light-handed satire, and quietly powerful insights into the contemporary political terrain. To the Occupant is an innovative and astounding collection from one of New Zealand’s leading writers of her generation.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 80

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Families, language, fear, loss, food and the victories that can come slowly. These are at the heart of this collection of poems by people who have come to New Zealand as migrants or refugees. "More Of Us" provides a glimpse into the experiences of this diverse group of people, which includes those who made New Zealand their home decades ago, and newcomers still finding their feet. And here they all are, speaking in their own distinctive voices. The companion book to "All Of Us", a collection of poems published by Landing Press in 2018.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 92

Dimensions: 150 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 17-01-2019

when life gives you spoons, demand a refund, an inquiry when life gives you spoons, scoop the innards, carve a heart when life gives you spoons, collect a set Alzheimer’s and a Spoon takes its readers on a tangled trip. Public stories – a conversation at the Castle of the Insane, online quizzes to determine if you’re mostly meercat or Hufflepuff. #stainlessteelkudos. Personal tales, of Liz’s babcia, a devout Catholic and a soldier in the Warsaw Uprising, who spent her last years with Alzheimer’s disease. There is much to remember that she so badly wanted to forget. What do you do when life gives you spoons?

Bind: paperback

Pages: 100

Dimensions: 155 x 235 mm

Publication Date: 28-06-2017

In the afternoon, peasant women set up shop beside their street-side fish smokers. Look, she said, from here you can see where the mountain range begins... And I wondered: what's the use being a tourist in a place like this? It's like bathing in clothes, kissing a lover through a handkerchief. - from "Lake Baikal" As The Verb Tenses is the work of a reflective and sensitive poetic talent: one run with gleaming wires of joy. In poems that gather together the vivid details of childhood memory, the surreal juxtapositions of life in the contemporary West, the wry observations of a temporary expatriate, the deeply lodged pain of historical and personal loss, Lynley Edmeades speaks to us in delicately spun lines that press out ironies, dissonances and profound formative experience. From playful, rhythmical poems about the art of dinner conversation, to warm glimpses of intimacy, she lays poetry's table with the knife of light satire, the bright salt of wit, the heady wine of love, the bread of knowledge. This quietly poised, confident first collection has a musical, emotional and thematic range of a substantial new talent.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 64

Dimensions: 150 x 230 mm

Publication Date: 21-03-2016

Using the extraordinary capacity of music to revive the places and people from our pasts, this poetic memoir springs from over 50 song titles of song lines and spans more than four decades.
Laconic, wry, subtly philosophical, Kay McKenzie Cooke's new collection carries us from her rural Southland girlhood in the 1950s and 60s to the bitter pressures of adopting out her baby as a teenager in the 1970s, and to her present as grandmother, mother, wife and author.
A plain-spoken honesty, a sensitivity tot he natural world, a gentle humour, a deep sense of how the richness of our relationships lodges in ordinary rituals and routines: all combine in a quietly moving autobiography.
"Born to a Red-Headed Woman" is documentary, vivid, ever grounded in the workaday detail of farming, the changing decades, family, city life and job. Yet at times the language peels right back to the tender nerve of major, formative losses.
If Cooke's observations of the daily are the simple melodic lines that seem to coast on the surface, beneath that runs a rich bass line of meditation on time, on meaning, how to live a life true to oneself, and to familial love.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 72

Dimensions: 148 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 28-04-2014

"Cloudboy" is a deep-mulling, richly sensitive account of a mother's adjustments to the needs of an autistic child.
This prize-winning suite of poems grows out of extremes of love and frustration, as the poet introduces a bright, unpredictable, markedly individual boy to the rigid, often airless routines of the school system.
Any empathetic parent knows the fears and anxieties of sending a young child into the world of other children, their casual cruelties and dreamy naivety. Each concern in exponentially increased when a child's educational and emotional needs set them apart.
Cloudboy writes his own version of Genesis, he invents a new language; he sketces intricate maps; he reads Aristotle and develops an obsession with Dr Who; he interrupts; he sways; his 'fists come clenched and swinging'. To onlookers, Cloudboy seems troubled, trouble.
Cirrus, cumulus, arcus, stratus: cloud forms speak to Harvey of the phrases of the mother-child bond; the mood-swings and leaps of her child's mind; the mutability of personality; the attraction and evaporation of human kindness; presence and absence; reverie and forgetfulness; the intensity and yet bittersweet transience of early childhood.
With a limber, gorgeously metamorphic sense of sculptural and sonic aspects of poetic form, this book is a tender and detailed atlas of a child's imaginative potential. Yet one of the most remarkable gifts it reveals for us readers is Cloudmother's own finely calibrated perceptions.

Bind: paperback

Pages: 80

Dimensions: 148 x 210 mm

Publication Date: 28-04-2014

The Conch Trumpet calls to the scattered tribes of contemporary New Zealand. It sounds the signal to listen close, critically and ‘in alert reverie’. David Eggleton’s reach of references, the marriage of high and low, the grasp of popular and classical allusion, his eye both for cultural trash and epiphanic beauty, make it seem as if here Shakespeare shakes down in the Pacific. There are dazzling compressions of history; astonishing paens to harbours, mountains, lakes and rivers; wrenchingly dark, satirical critiques of contemporary politics, of solipsism, narcissism, the apolitical, the corporate, with a teeming vocabulary to match. And often too a sense of the imperative, grounding reality of the phenomenal world – the thisness of things: Cloud whispers brush daylight’s ear; fern question-marks form a bush encore; forlorn heat swings cobbed in webs. – from ‘Nor-wester Flying’ In this latest collection David Eggleton is court jester/philosopher/lyricist, and a kind of male Cassandra, roving warningly from primeval swampland to gritty cityscape to the information and disinformation cybercloud

Bind: paperback

Pages: 124

Dimensions: 170 x 225 mm

Publication Date: 20-02-2015

Are you fed up with that one person who posts way too much personal info on social media? Are you worried your friend is taking the hipster look too far but don’t know how to tell them? Do you need a poem for when your satnav crashes and you start catastrophising that you’ll never make it home again? Yes? Then Poetry for Millennials is the answer to all your woes, offering poetry from some of our greatest literary figures as an antidote to help laugh off the most common millennial problems. From the joys of internet dating and house-shares to digital detoxing and growing up, this book will help make you more resilient to what’s thrown your way and show the previous generations that you definitely aren’t a snowflake *after wiping away your tears*.

Bind: hardback

Pages: 128

Dimensions: 127 x 170 mm

Publication Date: 08-08-2019