Dearly: Poems by Margaret Atwood

$34.00 NZD

Category: Poetry & Essays | Reading Level: near fine

The collection of a lifetime from the bestselling novelist and poet. By turns moving, playful and wise, the poems gathered in Dearly are about absences and endings, ageing and retrospection, but also about gifts and renewals. They explore bodies and minds in transition, as well as the everyday objects and rituals that embed us in the present. Werewolves, sirens and dreams make their appearance, as do various forms of animal life and fragments of our damaged environment. Before she became one of the world's most important and loved novelists, Atwood was a poet. Dearly is her first collection in over a decade. It brings together many of her most recognizable and celebrated themes, but distilled - from minutely perfect descriptions of the natural world to startlingly witty encounters with aliens, from pressing political issues to myth and legend. It is a pure Atwood delight, and long-term readers and new fans alike will treasure its insight, empathy and humour. ...Show more

Nouns Verbs Etc: Selected Poems by FIONA FARRELL

$35.00 NZD

Category: Poetry & Essays

One of New Zealand's most versatile writers, Fiona Farrell has published four collections of poetry over 25 years, from Cutting Out (1987) to The Broken Book (2011). Nouns, verbs, etc. collects the best work from these books, and intersperses them with other poems thus far 'uncollected'. The themes are wide ranging: political and personal, regional and global, including love and birth and death, war and emigration, history and landscape. The poems mix lyricism with the flat and plainspoken mode of Kiwi vernacular; they channel voices infrequently heard in poetry in traditional song and ballad forms. They are well crafted but unpretentious, jokey yet illuminating, self-deprecating but wise, sad and funny and deeply human. ...Show more

What If We Stopped Pretending? by Jonathan Franzen

$15.00 NZD

Category: Poetry & Essays

The climate crisis is here. Our chance to stop it has come and gone, but this doesn't have to mean the world is ending. 'Today, the scientific evidence verges on irrefutable. If you're younger than sixty, you have a good chance of witnessing the radical destabilization of life on earth--massive crop fa ilures, apocalyptic fires, imploding economies, epic flooding, hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing regions made uninhabitable by extreme heat or permanent drought. If you're under thirty, you're all but guaranteed to witness it. If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world's inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.' This is Jonathan Franzen's controversial New Yorker essay, published as a single volume that discusses a planet on the cusp of and what and how individuals can respond to that. ...Show more

Locals Only - An Outsider's Insider Perspective on Aotearoa by Craig Foltz

$23.00 NZD

Category: Poetry & Essays

A US exile gets lost in the Aotearoa bush exactly what he wanted. These poems range with exuberant humour and intelligence from tourist traps such as Franz Josef glacier, to Maungapohatu and other places more out-of-the-way than you could ever imagine. Sometimes it takes an outsider to find the uniquely absurd sights and rhythms that ensure we'll never look at home the same way again. ...Show more

National Anthem by Mohamed Hassan

$30.00 NZD

$35.00 (14% off)

Category: Poetry & Essays

National Anthem is a new poetry collection from award-winning journalist and writer Mohamed Hassan. It charts an intimate course through memories from his childhood and upbringing in Egypt, New Zealand, Turkey and elsewhere to untangle the intersecting traumas of migration, Islamophobia and grief and as k difficult questions about the essence of nationalism and belonging. Mohamed Hassan was the winner of the 2015 NZ National Poetry Slam, a TEDx fellow and recipient of the Gold Trophy at the 2017 New York Radio Awards. His poetry has been watched and shared widely online and taught in schools internationally. ...Show more

Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter

$22.99 NZD

Category: Poetry & Essays

In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and the pain of loss gives way to memories, the little unit of three starts to heal. In this extraordinary debut - part novella, part polyphonic fable, part essay on grief - Max Porter's compassion and bravura style combine to dazzling effect. Full of unexpected humour and profound emotional truth, Grief Is the Thing with Feathers marks the arrival of a thrilling new talent. ...Show more

Lanny by Max Porter

$22.99 NZD

Category: Poetry & Essays

From the author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers. Not far from London, there is a village. This village belongs to the people who live in it and to those who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England's mysterious past and its confounding present. It belongs to families dead for generat ions, and to those who have only recently moved here, such as the boy Lanny, and his mum and dad. But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, who has woken from his slumber in the woods. Dead Papa Toothwort, who is listening to them all.   ...Show more

Felt by Johanna Emeney

$24.99 NZD

Category: Poetry & Essays

Couples in last-chance therapy, friends unfriending, racist trolls trawling the comments section for game--this collection of poems is concerned with the things that make us feel. The felt realm is very much in nature, too. From the calm of a sleeping doe to the slow unwinding of the last bee on Earth, Johanna Emeney seems to say that there is a message in the air--for those who listen with all of the senses. ...Show more

How to Spot a Fascist by Umberto ECO

$9.00 NZD

Category: Poetry & Essays

We are here to remember what happened and to declare solemnly that 'they' must never do it again. But who are 'they'? HOW TO SPOT A FASCIST is a selection of three thought-provoking essays on freedom and fascism, censorship and tolerance - including Eco's iconic essay 'Ur-Fascism', which lists the fourt een essential characteristics of fascism, and draws on his own personal experiences growing up in the shadow of Mussolini. Umberto Eco remains one of the greatest writers and cultural commentators of the last century. In these pertinent pieces, he warns against prejudice and abuses of power and proves a wise and insightful guide for our times. If we strive to learn from our collective history and come together in challenging times, we can hope for a peaceful and tolerant future. Freedom and liberation are never-ending tasks. Let this be our motto- 'Do not forget.' ...Show more

The Decameron Project: 29 New Stories from the Pandemic by New York Times Magazine

$39.99 NZD

Category: Poetry & Essays

A stunning collection of new short stories originally commissioned by The New York Times Magazine as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world, from twenty-nine authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Colm Toibin, Kamilia Shamsie, David Mitchell and more, in a project inspired by Boccaccio's The De cameron. When reality is surreal, only fiction can make sense of it. In 1353, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote "The Decameron": one hundred nested tales told by a group of young men and women passing the time at a villa outside Florence while waiting out the gruesome Black Death, a plague that killed more than 25 million people. Some of the stories are silly, some are bawdy, some are like fables. In March of 2020, the editors of The New York Times Magazine created The Decameron Project, an anthology with a simple, time-spanning goal: to gather a collection of stories written as our current pandemic first swept the globe. How might new fiction from some of the finest writers working today help us memorialize and understand the unimaginable? And what could be learned about how this crisis will affect the art of fiction? These twenty-nine new stories, from authors including Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, Edwidge Danticat, and David Mitchell vary widely in texture and tone. Their work will be remembered as a historical tribute to a time and place unlike any other in our lifetimes, and offer perspective and solace to the reader now and in a future where coronavirus is, hopefully, just a memory.   ...Show more

Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur

$30.00 NZD

Category: Poetry & Essays | Reading Level: near fine

The Sunday Times Number One Bestseller Winner of The GoodReads Choice Award for Poetry 2017 From Rupi Kaur, the bestselling author of Milk and Honey, comes her long-awaited second collection of poetry. Illustrated by Kaur, The Sun and Her Flowers is a journey of wilting, falling, rooting, rising and b looming. It is a celebration of love in all its forms. this is the recipe of lifesaid my motheras she held me in her arms as i weptthink of those flowers you plantin the garden each yearthey will teach youthat people toomust wiltfallrootrisein order to bloom ...Show more

There's No Place Like the Internet in Springtime by Erik Kennedy

$25.00 NZD

Category: Poetry & Essays | Reading Level: near fine

Layering comedy over insight over rue and pathos over comedy, mixing its flexible couplets with beautifully spiky free verse, Erik Kennedy's first collection should climb up all the right charts: his phrases can go anywhere, then come back, and he has figured out how to sound both trustworthy and nonplu ssed, both giddy and humble, in the same breath. Sometimes he impersonates spiny lobsters; sometimes he's a socialist chambered nautilus. Sometimes he's our best guide to the globe-trotting ridiculous. And sometimes (start with Mailing in a Form Because There's No Online Form) hes the un-flick-off-able, so-wrong-he's-just-right guide to the way we live now. ...Show more