The best things are bright, yellow, and fizzing. They arrive in the middle of summer, packaged in a hazed holographic parcel, shining silver and purple and green. The best things are soft and quiet in their heartbreak. The best things make you wait, as they begin and end with waiting. London based Pema Monaghan’s The […]

Read more "A Daughter’s Last Word"

In January I read The Letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Ongoingness, and Hannah Sullivan’s Three Poems. January was too dark and a birthday of rain and cold and homesickness was too much. But in January H and I started to send moons to one another from across the world. It was usually in […]

Read more "My Year (in books)"

Written in the post-war period, and published during a time of nuclear tension, William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, explores notions of abandonment and home when “a pack of British boys” find themselves stranded on an island in the South Pacific. The isolated setting allows Golding to present the swift fall of these […]

Read more "Are we still living on the island?"

This summer of reading was not so much a summer (of sorts). It was a space of spaces—empty rooms and empty shelves in the packing and unpacking of our lives. It was six weeks of hazy reading, of not quite paying attention as my mind seemed to be always elsewhere. Wherever elsewhere may be—in bills […]

Read more "Summer’s reading"

Using such a word as hoe in the same line as Fitzcarraldo seems to go against the sleek and uniformed french flaps that make Fitzcarraldo iconic (are they iconic yet?), but hoe I am, and it rhymes, so call me hoe (thot!), and be done with it. Fitzcarraldo Editions, the house that publishes everything in […]

Read more "I’m a hoe for Fitzcarraldo"

The last time I swam in the ocean was (maybe) seventeen months ago. At home, Aotearoa New Zealand, a rushed dunk at dawn before driving back up to Auckland Airport to catch my flight back here (home?). Growing up in Auckland meant a childhood spent never far from the sea. We spent our summers on […]

Read more "A Well of Collective Memory: At the Pond"

I have a friend on the other side of the world and we write occasional long-form emails to one another. Emails that are a delight and surprise when they PING into my inbox. Emails that I often plunder for inspiration and emails that serve as a transcript of our friendship. It was in one of […]

Read more "In the mood for Too Much and Not the Mood"

Last week two fifteen year old girls asked this question — miss, does anyone actually read poetry? Yes. But what kind of answer is that from an English Teacher? And so today, the day before the day before summer, I spent my free period putting together a collection of fresh poetry for them. When I […]

Read more "Does Anyone Actually Read Poetry?"

Two years ago today we lay on the floor with the lights off and listened to Lorde’s Melodrama, shot straight through with no speaking, no pauses. That bright blue and violent violet glowed in the gloom—the not-quite darkness, for the light lingers longer here in June; it pushes out the night until even at the […]

Read more "Melodrama"