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 way the on and on and on grind of parenting makes her feel contradicted about love. Then there is the literal ash that has blanketed her town after a volcanic eruption – an event that echoes both the Christchurch earthquakes and the Covid-19 pandemic. (“There is no toilet paper left here in the city … This is how the world ends, I think to myself in the queue.”)
Dark, angry, funny too, Ash wields a mix of prose and poetic interludes to take on so much that is often unexpressed but very true about the gendered way we still approach the thing of family, and who it is that bears it.
LAURA WILLIAMSON
