Laura Williamson
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Book review: Six-legged Ghosts – the insects of Aotearoa
By Lily Duval Canterbury University Press (2024) As Lily Duval explains in her preface, Six-legged Ghosts had its inception in an art project for which she undertook to paint all of Aotearoa’s endangered and extinct species. A huge proportion of them, it turns out, are insects. But because they are little, or gross, or scary,…
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Poetry review: AUP New Poets 10 – Tessa Keenan, romesh dissanayake and Sadie Lawrence
Edited by Anne Kennedy Auckland University Press (2024) Each new release from the AUP New Poets series, which showcases new voices in contemporary poetry, is a must read and has been an introduction for many of us to poets that have gone on to define Aotearoa’s modern literary scene, including Rebecca Hawkes, Sonja Yelich, Claudia…
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Poetry review: Hopurangi—Songcatcher – Poems from the Maramataka
By Robert Sullivan Auckland University Press (2024) The poems in Hopurangi—Songcatcher are framed by the cycles of the Maramataka, the Māori lunar calendar. Having rejoined Facebook after a six-year absence, Robert Sullivan wrote and posted a poem a day for nearly three months, poems which are now collected here, in Hopurangi—Songcatcher. They explore a period…
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Book review: Ash
By Louise Wallace Te Waka Herenga University Press (2023) Thea is a vet at a rural practice with two small children who works miracles on a daily basis just to get out the fucking door. She is choking. She is choking on the way she is belittled as a working mother and choking on the…
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Book review: End Times
By Rebecca Priestley Te Herenga Waka University Press (2023) For those of us who came of age during the 1980s, watching young people grapple with the existential threat of climate change is a dose of déjà vu. Like global heating, back then the threat of nuclear war begged the question: how do you go about…
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Book review: Dark Sky – Murder among the stars
By Marie Connolly Quentin Wilson Publishing (2024) An astronomy professor is murdered at Tekapo’s Mt John Observatory during an academic conference, and there are suspects aplenty. When criminal psychologist Nellie Prayle gets involved, she finds out the academics have been up to all kinds of mischief, from adultery to professional rivalry to intellectual property theft…
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Big birds: The 1964 guide to the giant extinct penguins of Aotearoa
Most of us think well of penguins. There’s something joyous about their awkward waddling, something heart-warming about their tiny flipper wings, a reminder that these earthbound creatures once knew how to fly. They’ve featured in everything from an Oscar-winning documentary (March of the Penguins, in which Morgan Freeman chronicles the harrowing breeding-and-feeding cycle of Antarctica’s…
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Music review: Good Miles To Go
Jackie Bristow & Barry Saunders (2024) When Jackie’s not busy creating awesomeness with the music stars of tomorrow, she creates a fair bit of her own awesomeness too. She has released five albums and splits her time between Aotearoa and Nashville, USA, where she has been embraced by the Americana scene, sharing bills with the…
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Music review: SongCatcher/Youthtown EP Volume 1
Jackie B Productions, 2023. Produced by Mark Punch & Jackie Bristow. SongCatcher started as a one-day songwriting workshop run by the Queenstown- and Nashville-based singer-songwriter Jackie Bristow, then grew into a full songwriting programme that helps young people build their creative identities through music. These identities have now been showcased on a compilation EP, that…