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Tender, loving and visceral, Ovarium is a pamphlet of poems about a giant ovarian cyst. The poet charts her journey with the cyst, from diagnosis to surgery to recovery, via a landscape of scanner rooms and hospital wards. The poems explore the impact of illness, and the body as a site of disgust and shame but also healing and endurance. Ingham's poems are forensic as she looks at the disorientating and sometimes patriarchal language of anatomy and medicine, and the way illness can change the relationship we have with our own bodies.I tried to think of you as fruit, growingagainst the sun-warm wall of my gut.Melon-headed, you nudged the leafy organs,dug out a place for yourself in the plot.I never guessed. I was only bloody earthto you, a coldframe full of light. - from 'Cyst'
Playful, formal, satirical and tender, the poems in The Fabulanarchist Luxury Uprising are wildly wide-ranging. Jack Houston whisks the reader through meditations on family life, the teachings of Lucretius, the sexual potential of Captain Barnacles, and dreams of a socialist utopia, managing to be both deeply weird and touching. In his debut pamphlet, Houston draws out and scrutinises the mundanities of life, showing how they can form part of something much bigger. His poems aim to awaken the capacity for revolution within us all, even if it only gets us as far as the roundabout in the local playpark. "In the year 2121, weâ¿re all now too aware that a sofa is simply a bench constructed from the hewn corpse of a tree, covered in a mesh made from the amniotic fibres of oppressedly mono-cropped cotton plants & filled with the plumage from many a murdered full-grown duck [...]"- from 'Utopia'
In Milk Snake, Toby Buckley invites us to look at the world from a slightly different angle, where small things become unsettling if you look closely enough. The poet explores queerness, displacement and trauma through clear-voiced, deceptively gentle poems about fishermen, maggots and bees. bleary from sleep and warmwater and no glassesi spot an uncertain commaslidinghe drags his tail up myshower wall cumbersomeand not unmaggotesque and ican seehis gutsor maybe it'shis dinner- from 'companion'
You never know how things really are in other people's families, in other people's homes. There's the public face and the private truths - the personal griefs and tragedies, whether festering or resting in peace. In her wry, engagingly strange poems, Anne Bailey takes the door off the latch and lets us inside. She shows us loss and disappointment, as well as hardness and resilience, particularly through the eyes of a daughter, wife and mother. We see the domestic sphere in such close-up detail that it becomes bizarre, an uncanny dimension that nonetheless rings horribly, weirdly true. "e;So you've put a picture on the lovely blank wallthat used to go pink in the sun and feel like an ice cream. A wall on which I used to rest my eyes in pleasant contemplation."e;- from 'Domestic'
Bake a weird cake, join the School for Ghouls, and mind you don't step on the wardrobe monkeys! Anything is possible in the world of Cloud Soup, an endlessly delightful and breathlessly imaginative collection of poems by Kate Wakeling.
Leanne Radojkovich's writing is full of crisp, precise details, and often contains a sting. In Hailman, the follow-up to her 2017 debut First fox, the stories still have a dreamy, mythic feel, but are now rooted more firmly in the dusty suburbs and countryside of Aotearoa.In the title story, a child builds a snowman out of ice with her mum's friend Joyce and skirts round the edge of some adult truths. In 'Growing', a daughter visits her mother in the nursing home and tries to bond with her over flower seeds. In 'Double Dose', Patsy makes a Covid-y journey back to her hometown and touches on unpleasant memories of the past.All the rest home doors have name tags. Mum's has a typo: Irina. Although Irena isn't her born name - only she knows what that is, and she's never told, never discussed the war. Says she was born the day she reached Wellington harbour with papers stating she was a ten-year-old Polish orphan. Dad said not to ask about the European years, and my brother and I never did. Now they've both died and there's just me and Mum, and she's in a rest home with a mis-spelled name on her door.
An anthology of ten short stories about the night-time, by various authors.
The sequel to 'The Adventures of Na Willa'. Charming stories of a little girl growing up in Indonesia in the 1960s.
Part of the second batch of Bicki-Books, a collectible series of postcard-sized picture books which each features a classic Latvian poem. Suitable for children aged 3+.
Part of the second batch of Bicki-Books, a collectible series of postcard-sized picture books which each features a classic Latvian poem. Suitable for children aged 3+.
Falling Out Of The Sky is a treasury of poems which retell classic myths, legends and fairytales from across the world. Hansel and Gretel's witch takes us behind the scenes of the construction of her gingerbread cottage, and Medusa explains how the snakes on her head rule out a lot of options in everyday life - wearing a hat, for example. Full of alternate viewpoints and spirited new versions of old stories, Falling Out The Sky is a friendly introduction to poetry as well as the joy of literature. In tales about the beginning of time to the end of the world, poets and characters speak directly to the readers, reveling in the possibilities of storytelling. These are poems which parents can read aloud to younger children, and which older children can read to themselves, delighting in the mischief and invention of the poets.
Super Guppy is a collection of fifty-one wonderful, multifaceted poems for children of six years and up. Van de Vendel stays close to home: splashing through puddles and getting your socks wet, being tucked in at night by Mum, and having a plaster on your knee - ow! - taken off.
One day her friends Ana and Ilo ask her to join them on an adventure outside during a downpour. Kira discovers the joy of all the things that happen outside when it rains - from the new friends she makes, to the umbrellas on the streets, to the thrill of lightning, and finally, the warmth found at the end of each rainfall.
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