AUP New Poets – serie

Distinctive, fresh and compellingly present, AUP New Poets 10 features three exciting new voices.Looking out from today at a landscape peopled with her tūpuna, Tessa Keenan (Te Ātiawa) writes poems filled with quiet rage and remarkable lyricism. Meanwhile romesh dissanayake plays with language to explore food, family and edgy romance, from post-war Sri Lanka to Aotearoa. And, at just 20, Sadie Lawrence reveals the excitement and anguish of being young in a complicated world: ‘My love stands in the laundromat, Sunday best with blistered hands.’

Memoir, myth andcritical theory weave through Xiaole Zhan’s essay-poem ‘Arcadiana’ as theyexplore their Pākehā-Chinese family. Meanwhile, Margo Montes de Oca’s‘intertidal’ combines rich, elemental imagery – water, light, colour – with aworld of feeling and poetic homage. In an affecting conclusion, J. A. Vili’s‘Poems Lost During the Void’ pays tribute to family and friends, reaching outbeyond grief to show the beautiful intensity of community and connection.AUP New Poets 11 introduces threedistinctive and compelling voices to contemporary poetry.

Relaunched under the editorship of Anna Jackson in 2019, AUP New Poets 6 includes substantial selections from the poetry of Ben Kemp, Vanessa Crofskey and Chris Stewart. We move from Kemp's slow-paced attentive readings of place and people, in a selection moving between Japan and New Zealand, to the velocity of Vanessa Crofskey's fierce, funny, intimate and political poetry, which takes the form of shopping lists, Post-it Notes, graphs, erasures, a passenger arrival card and even *poetry*, and finally to Chris Stewart's visceral take on the domestic, the nights cut to pieces by teething, the gravity of love and the churn of time.AUP New Poets 6 is an arresting introduction to the rich diversity of contemporary New Zealand poetry.

From Apia to Parnell, ancient Rome to Aro Park and on to the furthest reaches of the internet, AUP New Poets 7 takes readers on an eye-popping journey through contemporary New Zealand poetry.The collection opens with Rhys Feeney's passionate take on contemporary global politics and ecological collapse. Next, Ria Masae leads us from a fale in Samoa to the pulsing streets of Auckland city in a voice rooted in the spoken word. And finally Claudia Jardine makes the startling images and unlikely facts from the classical world echo around inner-city Wellington. We see scars and tattoos, mutilated barbie dolls and deep-fried bananas, fat-soluble poisons and indestructible pumpkins as each poet's distinctive vocabulary and sense of rhythm combines in one powerful volume.

In AUP New Poets 8, Lily Holloway, Tru Paraha and Modi Deng come together to produce a volume of remarkable inventions and intoxications.Lily Holloway leads off with her collection 'a child in that alcove', using an inventive approach to form to lead the reader into the ordinary extraordinary events of daily life, her poetry filling them with dazzle and dread, questions and memories. Then Tru Paraha takes us inside 'my darkling universe' - a world 'perpetually astral' and 'utterly spaghettified', a poetic universe of unexpected letters and words and forms, where te reo Maori collides with atomic chemistry. Finally, Modi Deng travels through time and space into the lives of Brahms and backpackers, where uneasy conversations between mothers and children, between 'the subjects and myself', between Beijing and London, provide beauty and solace.Three new voices, three compelling visions, all bound together in AUP New Poets 8.