Edited by Carrie Rudzinski and Grace Iwashita-Taylor (Auckland University Press, 2023)
“I fell in love at the poetry night / with the meter of the verse / steady rhythms and free-flowing rhyme / visionary prophets gliding on intuitive time / the hopeful expression of these beautiful minds” – Andy Coyle
Some poetry is written for the page and some for the stage. It is the latter that is the focus of Rapture. In its pages, editors Grace Iwashita-Taylor and Carrie Rudzinski have set about curating a representative collection of Aotearoa’s performance poetry scene, which is as brilliant as it is huge and diverse. The ninety writers here include poets, playwrights, essayists, storytellers, rappers and un-genre-able artists who all represent contemporary poetry and the many ways it can be conveyed out loud.
As the current New Zealand Poet Laureate Chris Tse writes in his introduction to the anthology, “the editors of Rapture aren’t preoccupied with asking what poetry is ̶ instead, the question is: What does poetry do?” – LW
