Blog
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Show You’re Working Out
By liz breslin (Dead Bird Books, 2025) If this book is afraid, it doesn’t give a fuck and goes ahead anyway. Which is to say this poetry is a resourceful, DIY, lesbian builder that will deconstruct the ambient violence it encounters and create a shelter of banter, a huddle of tenderness, a tent for marchers…
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Book review: Aotearoa Light
Moments of Wonder and Realisation in New Zealand Wilderness By Peter Laurenson (Bateman Books, 2025) In Aotearoa Light, Peter Laurenson combines his stunning landscape photography with a message of positive action. The hope is that, rather than pleading, shaming or cajoling, sharing images like the ones in the book can be galvanising when it comes…
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Clay Eaters
By Gregory Kan (Auckland University Press, 2025) Clay Eaters is Wellington-based poet Gregory Kan’s third collection. In it, he takes us far from here in space and time to a jungle island, one that is both figuratively and literally hard to navigate due to the tangled nature of memory, and the unreliability of maps. It…
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How to Darn a Salmon
By Barry G Barry Grehan, performing as Barry G, is an Irish folk singer who was, for a time, a regular on the Wānaka and Queenstown music scenes. How to Darn a Salmon came out of Barry’s practice of writing short poems for 15 minutes at the start of each day, which he kept up…
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Book review: Southern Faces – An introduction to rock climbing in Ōtepoti Dunedin
Edited by Riley Smith (Wildlab, 2025) Although it’s subtitled ‘An introduction to rock climbing in Ōtepoti Dunedin’, Southern Faces is more than a climbing guidebook. As you would expect, it is packed with helpful technical information covering the cliffs, boulders and pinnacles of greater Ōtepoti – grading, number of bolts, approximate route and rappel lengths,…
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A Wild Life: Photographs from the backcountry of Aotearoa
By Shaun Barnett (Potton & Burton, 2024) The epilogue of Dave Hansford’s Kahurangi closes with some words from one of Shaun Barnett’s last interviews, before he died from cancer in 2024. “The more I learn about the connectivity of diversity, the connectivity of things,” he said, “it gives me a profound sense of joy.” A…
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Book review: Kahurangi – The Nature of Kahurangi National Park and Northwest Nelson
By Dave Hansford (Potton & Burton, 2024) Aotearoa’s second largest national park, Kahurangi National Park is known for its epic tramping, diverse landscapes, wealth of fossils, and extraordinary range of flora and fauna, including great spotted kiwi, cave spiders and a giant carnivorous Iand snail (the Powelliphanta, which can grow as big as a gym…
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Poetry review: /slanted
By Alison Glenny (Compound Press, 2024) /slanted is Alison Glenny’s third poem collection, full of the sort of poems that I find hard to explain and easy to deeply, deeply love. The word ‘ECHO’ echoing multiple-y across the page, for example, fading out then gone, as echoes do and are in the mountains. /slanted is…
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Poetry review: HOOT!
Words from the Ōtepoti Writers Lab community 2019–2024 Edited by Eliana Gray and liz breslin(Rivulet Press, 2024) Ōtepoti Writers Lab, or ŌWL, was a writerly thing of collective beauty, collective beauty which has now been anthologised in HOOT!. Launched in 2019 by Prospect Park Productions (run by H-J Kilkelly and Emily Duncan), ŌWL was, H-J…