POETRY
2024 curated booklist
Echidna
essa may ranapiri
essa may ranapiri’s second poetry collection follows the story of Echidna, their own interpretation of the Greek Mother of Monsters, as she tries to figure out life and identity living in a colonised world. Alongside this, Māui and Prometheus get into a very hot relationship. Echidna contends with three strands of tradition; Greek mythology, Christianity and Māori esoteric knowledge, and through weaving them together attempts to create a queerer whole. It is a book that is in conversation with the work of many others; from Milton and R.S. Thomas to jayy dodd and Joshua Whitehead to Hinemoana Baker and Keri Hulme. Situating and building its own world out of a community of queer and Māori/Pasifika writing, it carefully places itself in a whakapapa of takatāpui story-telling.
Category: NZ Authors, Poetry, Fantasy
Representation: Takatāpui
Content Warnings: Unknown
ISBN: 9781776920099
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
Rangikura
Tayi Tibble
Tayi Tibble returns on the heels of her incendiary debut with a bold new follow-up. Barbed and erotic, vulnerable and searching, Rangikura asks readers to think about our relationship to desire and exploitation. Moving between hotel lobbies and all-night clubs, these poems chronicle life spent in spaces that are stalked by transaction and reward. Here is a poet staking out a sense of freedom on her own terms in times that very often feel like end times. Tibble’s range of forms and sounds are dazzling. Written with Māori moteatea, purakau, and karakia (chants, legends, and prayers) in mind, Rangikura explores the way the past comes back, even when she tries to turn her back on it. At once a coming-of-age and an elegy to the traumas born from colonization, especially the violence enacted against indigenous women, Rangikura interrogates not only the poets’ pain, but also that of her ancestors. The intimacy of these poems will move readers to laughter and tears. Speaking to herself, sometimes to the reader, these poems arc away from and return to their ancestral roots to imagine the end of the world and a new day. They invite us into the swirl of nostalgia and exhaustion produced in the pursuit of an endless summer. A new highpoint from a writer of endless talent.
Category: NZ Authors, Poetry
Representation: Takatāpui, BIPOC
Content Warnings: Racism, abuse
ISBN: 9781776920730
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Brown Girls in Red Lipstick
Courtney Sina Meredith
Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick is a collection of poetry by Courtney Sina Meredith. Meredith has established a local and international reputation as a performer, poet, musician and playwright. Her work is an on-going discussion of contemporary urban life with an underlying Pacific politique and an educated, politically aware, international voice. Courtney Sina Meredith is a fulltime Arts Advisor for Auckland Council where she develops programmes for young artists, diverse communities and community artists. She is of Samoan, Mangaian and Irish descent.
Category: NZ Authors, Poetry
Representation: Diverse sexualities, MVPFAFF+
Content Warnings: Sexual activity
ISBN: 9781776920730
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)
Nothing is Okay
Rachel Wiley
Nothing is Okay is the second full-length poetry collection by Rachel Wiley, whose work simultaneously deconstructs the lies that we were taught about our bodies and our beings, and builds new ways of viewing ourselves. As she delves into queerness, feminism, fatness, dating, and race, Wiley molds these topics into a punching critique of culture and a celebration of self. A fat positive activist, Wiley’s work soars and challenges the bounds of bodies and hearts, and the ways we carry them.
Category: Poetry
Representation: Diverse sexualities
Content Warnings: Sexual violence, fatphobia, homophobia, racism, disordered eating/eating disorder, sexual activity
ISBN: 9781943735303
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He’s So Masc
Chris Tse
In How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes, Chris Tse took readers back to a shocking 1905 murder. Now he brings the reader much closer to home. He’s So MASC confronts a contemporary world of self-loathing poets and compulsive liars, of youth and sexual identity, and of the author as character – pop star, actor, hitman, and much more. These are poems that delve into worlds of hyper-masculine romanticism and dancing alone in night clubs. With its many modes and influences, He’s So MASC is an acerbic, acid-bright, yet unapologetically sentimental and personal reflection on what it means to perform and dissect identity, as a poet and a person.
Category: Poetry, NZ Author
Representation: Gay, BIPOC
Content Warnings: No warnings apply
ISBN: 9781869408879
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Poukahangatus: Poems
Tayi Tibble
An acclaimed young poet explores her identity as a twenty-first-century Indigenous woman. Poem by poem, Tibble carves out a bold new way of engaging history, of straddling modernity and ancestry, desire and exploitation.
Intimate, moving, virtuosic, and hilarious, Tayi Tibble is one of the most exciting new voices in poetry today. In Poūkahangatus (pronounced “Pocahontas”), her debut volume, Tibble challenges a dazzling array of mythologies—Greek, Māori, feminist, kiwi—peeling them apart, respinning them in modern terms. Her poems move from rhythmic discussions of the Kardashians, sugar daddies, and Twilight to exquisite renderings of the natural world and precise emotions (“The lump in her throat swelled like a sea that threatened to take him from her, and she had to swallow hard”). Tibble is also a master narrator of teenage womanhood, its exhilarating highs and devastating lows; her high-camp aesthetics correlate to the overflowing beauty, irony, and ruination of her surroundings.
These are warm, provocative, and profoundly original poems, written by a woman for whom diving into the wreck means taking on new assumptions—namely, that it is not radical to write from a world in which the effects of colonization, land, work, and gender are obviously connected. Along the way, Tibble scrutinizes perception and how she as a Māori woman fits into trends, stereotypes, and popular culture. With language that is at once colorful, passionate, and laugh-out-loud funny, Poūkahangatus is the work of one of our most daring new poets.
Category: Poetry, NZ Author
Representation: Takatāpui, BIPOC
Content Warnings: Racism, sexual activity, disordered eating/eating disorder, substance use/abuse
ISBN: 9780593467893
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If They Come For Us
Fatimah Asghar
From a co-creator of the Emmy-nominated web series Brown Girls comes an imaginative, soulful debut poetry that collection captures the experiences of being a young Pakistani Muslim woman in contemporary America. Orphaned as a child, Fatimah Asghar grapples with coming of age and navigating questions of sexuality and race without the guidance of a mother or father. These poems at once bear anguish, joy, vulnerability, and compassion, while also exploring the many facets of violence: how it persists within us, how it is inherited across generations, and how it manifests itself in our relationships. In experimental forms and language both lyrical and raw, Asghar seamlessly braids together marginalized people’s histories with her own understanding of identity, place, and belonging.
Category: Poetry
Representation: Diverse sexualities BIPOC
Content Warnings: Racism, character death, sexual violence, bullying, islamophobia, homophobia, religion
ISBN: 9780525509783
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Super Model Minority
Chris Tse
From making boys cry with the power of poetry to hitting back against microaggressions and sucker punches, these irreverent and tender poems dive headfirst into race and sexuality.
Category: Poetry, NZ Author
Representation: Gay, BIPOC
Content Warnings: Homophobia, racism
ISBN: 9781869409616
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Pillow Thoughts
Courtney Peppernell
Pillow Thoughts is a collection of poetry and prose about heartbreak, love, and raw emotions. It is divided into sections to read when you feel you need them most.
Category: Poetry
Representation: Lesbian
Content Warnings: Self-harm, suicide, homophobia
ISBN: 9781449489755
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Black Girl, Call Home
Jasmine Mans
A literary coming-of-age poetry collection, an ode to the places we call home, and a piercingly intimate deconstruction of daughterhood, Black Girl, Call Home is a love letter to the wandering black girl and a vital companion to any woman on a journey to find truth, belonging, and healing.
Category: Poetry
Representation: Lesbian, BIPOC
Content Warnings: Racism, police violence/brutality, sexual violence, homophobia, transphobia, character death, religion, suicide
ISBN: 9780593197141
Find it in your local library (WorldCat)