AUP New Poets 7 is a deep dive into the rich diversity of New Zealand poetry today.Relaunched under the editorship of Anna Jackson in 2019, AUP New Poets 7 includes substantial selections from the poetry of Rhys Feeney, Ria Masae and Claudia Jardine. From Apia to Parnell, Ancient Rome to dreams of Venus, Aro Park to the furthest reaches of the internet, the poems of Rhys Feeney, Ria Masae and Claudia Jardine take us places &– including the darkest reaches of emotional geographies lit up in startling new ways. Each poet writes with a rich vocabulary and distinct sense of rhythm, as they bring us mutilated barbie dolls, indestructible pumpkins, fat-soluble poisons, jelly-fish, seagulls, eight-tala jugs of cocktails, loom weights, unseasonable journeys, deep-fried bananas, pet rabbits, destructive chickens, scars and tattoos, parataxis and ellipses, instructions on how to make toast, and more, so much more.

What, then, for the work of poetry? It's at the very periphery of popular speech, niche even among the arts, yet it's also rooted in the most ancient traditions of oral storytelling, no matter where your ancestors originate from. And, as we were reminded by an audience member at the New Zealand Young Writers Festival in 2020, who are we to say poetry cannot change the world?A poem may not be a binding policy or strategic investment, but poems can still raise movements, and be moving in their own right. And there is no movement in our behaviours and politics without a shift in hearts and minds. Whether the poems you read here are cloaked in ironic apathy or bare their hearts in rousing calls to action, they all arise from a deep sense of care for this living world and the people in it.Our poets are eulogists and visionaries, warriors and worriers. Most of all, they're ordinary people prepared to sit and stare at a blank page, trying to do something with the bloody big troubles looming over our past, present and future.— from the introduction by the editors

Post-it notes and shopping lists, Japanese monks and children's lungs: AUP New Poets 6 is a deep dive into the rich diversity of New Zealand poetry today.Relaunched under the editorship of Anna Jackson in 2019, AUP New Poets 6 includes substantial selections from the poetry of Ben Kemp, Vanessa Crofskey and Chris Stewart. We move from Kemp's slow-paced attentive readings of place and people, in a selection moving between Japan and New Zealand, to the velocity of Vanessa Crofskey's fierce, funny, intimate and political poetry, which takes the form of shopping lists, Post-it Notes, graphs, erasures, a passenger arrival card and even *poetry*, and finally to Chris Stewart's visceral take on the domestic, the nights cut to pieces by teething, the gravity of love and the churn of time.AUP New Poets 6 is an arresting introduction to the rich diversity of contemporary New Zealand poetry.

From the South Auckland Poets Collective to regional writers festivals, at poetry slams and open mic nights, in theatre works like Show Ponies and Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, performance poetry has taken off in Aotearoa.In this anthology, ninety performance poets, rappers, spoken-word artists, slam poets, theatre makers, genre blenders and storytellers come together to celebrate the diverse voices and communities within Aotearoa &– including Ben Brown and Mohamed Hassan, Grace Iwashita-Taylor and Tusiata Avia, Nathan Joe and Dominic Hoey, Freya Daly Sadgrove, David Eggleton and Selina Tusitala Marsh.Rapture is a parallel narrative about contemporary poetry in Aotearoa &– one that doesn' t just sit on the page, but leaps from it.

Distinctive, fresh and compellingly present, AUP New Poets 10 features three exciting new voices.Looking out from today at a landscape peopled with her tupuna, Tessa Keenan (Te Atiawa) writes poems filled with quiet rage and remarkable lyricism. Meanwhile romesh dissanayake plays with language to explore food, family and edgy romance, from post-war Sri Lanka to Aotearoa. And, at just 20, Sadie Lawrence reveals the excitement and anguish of being young in a complicated world: &‘ My love stands in the laundromat, Sunday best with blistered hands.'

Bloody Woman is bloody good writing. It moves between academic, journalistic and personal essay. I love that Lana moves back and forward across these genres: weaving, weaving – spinning the web, weaving the sparkling threads under our hands, back and forward across a number of spaces, pulling and holding the tensions, holding up the baskets of knowledge. Tusiata Avia This wayfinding set of essays, by acclaimed writer and critic Lana Lopesi, explores the overlap of being a woman and Sāmoan. Writing on ancestral ideas of womanhood appears alongside contemporary reflections on women's experiences and the Pacific. These essays lead into the messy and the sticky, the whispered conversations and the unspoken. As Lopesi writes, 'Bloody Woman has been scary to write... In putting words to my years of thinking, following the blood and revealing the evidence board in my mind, I am breaking a silence to try to understand something. It feels terrifying, but right.' These acts of self-revelation ultimately seek to open up new spaces, to acknowledge the narratives not yet written, and the voices to come.

Filled with hickeys puttanesca and tart wit, BITER is an apt title for Claudia Jardine' s debut collection of verse. Fresh translations of erotic Greek epigrams are threaded through boozy sonnets, ecstatic odes and startlingly vulnerable love poems. Jardine weaves ancient and modern together into a rich, glitzy, idiosyncratic tapestry – and in doing so crafts a poetic voice that is at once classical and frisky.