Contributors
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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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Night at the asylum
A stay at the West Coast’s spookiest backpackers. If you’ve ever been to Hokitika, you’ve probably stopped at the glowworm dell: a little crevasse alongside State Highway 6, usually packed with tourists marvelling at what daylight reveals to be the slimy larvae of the fungal gnat. But if you take a wrong turn on the…
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Under your own green steam
“There is no machine known that is more efficient than a human on a bicycle. A bowl of oatmeal, 30 miles, you can’t come close to that. Put a bowl of oatmeal in your car, you’re not going anywhere, let alone 30 miles. The efficiency is terrible compared to a human.” These are the words…
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Five skaters and a goalie
It was bedlam, plain and simple. North Korean military police had stormed the ice and were trying to wrangle a team of South Africans. They were slipping and sliding as they chased the hockey players around the rink in front of a crowd of thousands. In the stands was 17-year-old Simon Glass. His home in…