How can a book ever capture the live spirit of spoken word? Veteran of Auckland’s spoken word scene Tim Heath reviews the recent Trans-Tasman anthology Solid Air: Australian and New Zealand Spoken Word. Edited by David Stavanger and Anne-Marie Te Whiu, it includes work by Taika Waititi, Tayi Tibble, Hera Lindsay Bird, Behrouz Boochani, Selina Tusitala Marsh and many others.

Several years ago, I spent 10...

Whose intimacy and whose pain can we write, and still sleep soundly? A lyric essay by Joan Fleming.

“Yet I ride by the margin of that lake . . . / . . . and have a small boy’s notion of doing good”

––Robert Creeley, “The Way”

Once I took a trauma that wasn’t mine and made a poem out of it. What’s the name for that kind of power? How should I name that taking, and what is its relationship to love...

Sometimes we reveal our darkest desires online, safely hidden behind the veil of the screen. Huni Mancini delves into obsession, intimacy and loneliness in Natasha Matila-Smith’s artwork.

I sift through the images and texts on her website and Instagram account, looking at her body of work. This distance leads me to create my own vantage point, imagining how they might have looked in person, and...