Levin GP Glenn Colquhoun talks with books editor Catherine Woulfe about his new collection of poetry, Letters to Young People. Glenn Colquhoun is an acclaimed and accomplished poet. He has published four collections, including Playing God, in December 2002, which sold a massive 10,000 copies. He’s won a clutch of Montanas and the 2004 Prize … Read more
Summer reissue: She’s head girl, a viral star, a poet. But none of those credentials can ever capture the force of nature that is Aigagalefili ‘Fili’ Fepulea’i-Tapua’i. Portraits by Edith Amituanai. First published September 12 2020. Independent journalism depends on you. Help us stay curious in 2021. The Spinoff’s journalism is funded by its members … Read more
Books editor Catherine Woulfe runs through her favourites. This is a joyfully subjective list, in no particular order, and with no real thought for how many are novels or non-fiction or non-fiction with illustrations, or whatever. They’re just books I flat-out love. Some we’ve covered during the year but others, equally deserving, completely whooshed past … Read more
In New Zealand classical music, the writers of words are routinely hidden from view. If they care so little, why not settle for humming the melody, asks NZ’s inaugural poet laureate, Bill Manhire. I watched the Whānau London Voices concert the other day, and admired the initiative and spirit of the venture, as well as … Read more
A special poem by Labour’s deputy leader Kelvin Davis, following in the tradition of political verse started by David Cunliffe. A year ago I started a tale A story with a chapter yet to unveil Of a world of light and some pretty ugly taniwha Of a guy called Kevin Davies And a joke that’s … Read more
She’s head girl, a viral star, a poet. But none of those credentials can ever capture the force of nature that is Aigagalefili ‘Fili’ Fepulea’i-Tapua’i. Portraits by Edith Amituanai. The sky above Aorere College is a brilliant blue. Sunlight gets into every corner of the campus, and music spills out into the morning from a … Read more
When Elizabeth Heritage forgot how to read, poetry brought her back. This is the story of my reading of Funkhaus, the new poetry collection by Hinemoana Baker (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Toa, Te Āti Awa) writing from Berlin. I sing of fear and confusion: mine not Baker’s. Let me start with my favourite poem … Read more
Books editor Catherine Woulfe takes an energising walk around the lockdown block of New Zealand books. When the bubbles settled over us they settled over the books too. Libraries were the first to shut down, then the physical bookstores and finally, the hammer blow: online sales and indeed any notion of benevolently posting books about … Read more
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Picador, $20) Six weeks at the top of the Auckland chart, now. … Read more
A poem by US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. The Fight The rising sun paints the feet of night-crawling enemies. And they scatter into the burning hills. I have fought each of them. I know them by name. From before I could speak. I’ve used every weapon. To make them retreat. Yet they return every night … Read more
‘I could’ve drawn a big penis on it, you know, but that’s really unoriginal.’ If you were charging through the mean streets of Newmarket last week, to the mall or to work or the train, you might have noticed a couple of A4 posters at eyeball level on the traffic light poles at the corner … Read more
Acclaimed New Zealand-born poet Amy Brown on how the first months of motherhood blasted her writing life – and, eventually, inspired her radically honest new verse journal. The night after birth, when the milk came in, a midwife gave me her pen. I was supposed to use it to write the times of feeds, their … Read more
Data scientist Aaron Schiff pays tribute to the gorgeous new atlas which is also about poetry and climate change and privilege. We’ve also run an extract, here. What Chris McDowall and Tim Denee have made is a smashed-it-out-of-the-park heroically monumental work of data visualisation art. We Are Here deserves to become a much-loved dog-eared reference, … Read more
Uther Dean responds to the essay we published last week, in which Sandra Simpson expressed her frustration at people who misunderstood and disrespected haiku. When I was writing haiku there were two kinds of people who liked to tell me I wasn’t writing haiku. The first were early millennial or late Gen X white men … Read more
Sandra Simpson, champion of haiku, writes to those who misunderstand – and disrespect – the form that defines her writing life. (This weekend, a response from Uther Dean). On March 15 this year The Spinoff published in its coveted Friday Poem spot 11 “haiku” by Uther Dean. The quote marks are intentional. Brace for a … Read more
The new and spectacular atlas We Are Here is page after page of haunting, hella beautiful visual data, each chapter introduced with an essay. This one, Lost in the Forest, opens the section on people. At some point in the 1990s, one of the creators of this book tried to impress me by talking about … Read more
A new poem by Auckland poet Lily Holloway. modernity to globalisation when I get there as still life and landscape and also portraiture seeking the cacti in small pots who dot the globe slices of pie offer up the vision after the sermon expressing emotions without coherent narrative support because no artist responded to this … Read more
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 Talking to Strangers: what we should know about the people we don’t know by Malcolm Gladwell (Allen Lane, $40) Auckland … Read more
A poem by New Zealand-born writer Rachel Sawaya. It’s That Big my butt is gigantic not in the way that clouds are not a giant peach it doesn’t float like a pair of hot air balloons it’s more of a flatbed truck with a load of timber and a loose tarp or rather, … Read more
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Chatto & Windus, $48) “… part of the engine of The Testaments is a challenging … Read more
Joan Fleming on Wild Honey: Reading New Zealand Women’s Poetry, the humming, house-like opus by poet and champion of poets, Paula Green. When Miranda July came to Melbourne in 2016, she did something that I have found difficult to forget. She told us that she was going to stage a conversation between ‘all the men … Read more
A prose poem by Wellington writer Susanna Gendall. Art The number of artists at the art gallery was overwhelming. It seemed there were too many. There were too many. Never would so many poems be assembled in a single building and people expected to walk around and read each one. It seemed an unfair burden … Read more
Prolific, award-winning Palmerston North poet Paula Harris somehow manages to be stroppy and properly vulnerable all at once. Here, she writes about her first slam competition – and why she cried all the way home. I am old enough to have given birth to most of the people here. Sure, there’s a couple of parents … Read more
Paula Green, madwoman, took it upon herself to launch three (3) books this month. The biggie is Wild Honey, a deeply-researched but accessible tribute to women poets in New Zealand. We’ve a review underway, but for now, let’s talk about the cover – the bit that hits you first. It’s a painting by artist and … Read more
Entries for the National Schools Poetry Award close in just over a month. Here, 2019 judge Chris Tse revisits the “surprisingly inspiring” poetry of his teenage years. The story of how I fell into writing poetry is peak teenage life: I was angsty and my friends were doing it. I could’ve turned to stronger vices … Read more
The only published and available bestselling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 Toll by Luke Wright (Penned in the Margins, $32) “Part Essex wide boy, part dandy fop, he writes from the sidelines … Read more
Poet Steven Toussaint on the explosive, triumphant wizardry that is happening here and now. This much is obvious: something electrifying is taking place in New Zealand poetry. I became a permanent resident of this country four years ago, and at that time I privately considered verse here to have grown a little stale. While stand-out … Read more
A new poem sequence by Wellington poet Jackson Nieuwland. They told me to be myself, so I entered the hive. Bees the size of my head descended upon me. They covered every inch of my body like a chrysalis. I continued walking forward, through a blur of buzz and fuzz. At the center of … Read more
New poetry by Wellington writer Carolyn DeCarlo. The Ultimate Freedom of Space and Time Sometimes when masturbating I think about my friends’ perfect bodies having sex with angels. Or, angelic sex with each other. Or, dirty sex where my friends are covered in mud and having sex with earthworms. Having sex in pools of blood … Read more