Poetry of Aotearoa

Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2026

For this 75th anniversary edition of Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, editor Tracey Slaughter rounds up essential new poetry, reviews, and essays from both established and emerging New Zealand poets. Another packed issue, #60 showcases the raw and vital in 138 new poems — including from this year’s featured poet, Josiah Morgan — and 29 reviews. Its publication marks 75 years since poet Louis Johnson established New Zealand Poetry Yearbook in 1951, and it’s still as important and relevant now as it was then. It’s the ideal way to catch up with the latest poems and reviews by some of this country’s best-known poets and literary critics.

Rapture

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.

Watching Television in a Love Motel

In this unforgettable first book of poetry by Haro Lee, television—like love—binds us, liberates us, inspires, infuriates, and illuminates us. Watching Television in a Love Motel is a poetic chronicle of Haro’s time in Aotearoa, South Korea, and the United States of America. In four parts—‘Daytime Television’, ‘Primetime Television’, ‘Late Night Television’, and ‘Graveyard Slot’—she looks at her past, family, and self with the help of the unwavering cultural force that is TV. Big subjects are caught in its glow: God, drugs, love, anti-motherhood, intergenerational trauma, loneliness, failure, and 3am existential anxiety. The final section is a love letter to a dying neighbourhood in Seoul. Set against the heartache of a rapidly developing nation, this is the story of one girl and her life with a beloved grandmother....

I Thought We'd Be Famous

I Thought We’d Be Famous is a line in the sand. It's a look back on Dominic’s days pre chronic illness, and a new life of blood tests and cancer scares. It’s about the dreams that rusted in the backyard and the ones he ended up living. It's about the guilt in his blood after escaping a life of welfare and minimum wage. It's about the absurdity of trying to make sense of this broken society. It's about Channing Tatum and Edward Furlong and Chilli the Pomeranian and the teacher who beat us half to death and killing your landlord and sleeping with zombies and falling in love so hard you wake up concussed.

No Good

In summer when I picked dandelionsfor the geriatric guinea pig I changed the world.I killed a weed. I filled a mouth with gold. In this debut poetry collection, Sophie van Waardenberg considers girlhood and grief, love and its loss, distance and the return home, including at its heart a sequence of emotionally raw ‘Cremation Sonnets’. In its essence, this collection is the poet exploring ‘goodness’: ‘I am unbegrudging. I am the openest pair of arms’, she tells us. ‘I am a large dirty lake, a tepid naughty heart.’ I cannot accept this ending. I have fallenfrom the highest ledge. I will never land.So what if I am safe? I am not.

Black Sugarcane

Black Sugarcane is a landmark debut collection by Nafanua Purcell Kersel. Restless in form and address, these engaging and generous poems ricochet from light to dark, quiet to loud, calm to violence. We meet a loved twin sister as she dives towards the Sacred Centre, a grandmother who knows everything by heart, a shrugging office clerk, and Nafanua herself, an enigmatic shapeshifter. At the heart of Black Sugarcane is a sequence of erasure poems arising from the seminal essay 'In Search of Tagaloa' by Tui Atua Tamasese Ta'isi Efi. From the worlds contained in the text, these poems rise as if inevitable. Another sequence responds to the devastating tsunami that struck between the Samoan islands of Upolu and Tutuila in September 2009. Within the line, within the word...

e kō, nō hea koe

The debut collection of poetry from Matariki Bennett (Ngāti Pikiao, Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Hinerangi) is a series of goodbyes and attempts to slow the shedding. It's a group of teenagers sparking up as they watch the great pacific garbage patch catapult into space and become a second moon, it's endless conversations with Grandmama about stars, it is the constant rebirth of whakapapa and learning that silence isn’t the best part of her.

Pepeha Portal

Pepeha Portal is the keenly anticipated debut poetry collection from New Zealand Arts Laureate Ariana Tikao. Rooted in Kāi Tahu identity, the collection chronicles a homecoming and offers a moving account of memory, place, and belonging. Born and raised in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Tikao left the city after the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. In 2023, she was awarded the Ursula Bethell Residency at the University of Canterbury and returned to live in a place that was both deeply familiar and astonishingly new. Written largely during this period, Pepeha Portal is shaped by stories embedded in the landscape—many long erased by colonialism and only recently exposed by cultural as much as geological shifts. Responding to suburban landscapes and tīpuna places, personal memory and ancestral voice, Pepeha Portal considers...

Pakiaka

Pakiaka, the lean, essential debut volume by Gabrielle Huria, is a timely reminder of how good poetry can be at storytelling. The stories Huria tells are local and cosmic, firmly rooted in Ngai Tahu whakapapa and Te Waipounamu history but always attuned to the wide, interconnected world. These are accounts of stolen land and agricultural negligence, but also of tradition, connection, kaitiakitanga, birds, eels, rivers, and winds. Of sharing kai and responsibilities. These are poems that scoff at our complacencies and ask a vital question: Is this what Maori women do? Carry the world on their backs?

Terrier, Worrier

"If sometimes I think of thoughts as being behind the eyes, sometimes I think of them more as floating, in a kind of cloud around the outside of my head." Part autobiography of thought, part philosophical tract, part poetics, a book about chickens and family and seasons, Terrier, Worrier is a literary sequence to be relished as language and as thought.

Te Whāriki

In journals and pubs, on TikTok and the bestseller lists, the current generation of New Zealand poets is finding new voices, new platforms, and new readers. It is a poetry of now: of emojis and hashtags, of bodies and flesh, of identity and aspiration. How to take the measure of this new rush of poetic energy, invention, and disruption? What new aesthetics emerge alongside these new voices? How might old forms and old questions take the pulse of the new? Te Whāriki provides a first reading of this exciting moment by weaving together the work of ten contemporary poets from Aotearoa with new critical writing that makes sense of these poets and their poems. Pulling these strands together in one volume, Te Whāriki is as dynamic, various, and...

Spellbound

Francis Aschoff’s debut poetry collection is a time machine trip from the heights of first love to the yellow days of infancy, from crying in club bathrooms to a future not yet known. These poems are a magnifying glass, a tender eye and a flame thrower. They are love poems to the difficulties of love – love that is absent or which can’t be felt even when it’s there. Spellbound zings with surprising images that will make you see, and feel, differently.***"Spellbound is a feast of raw-hearted morsels, bursting with tenderness for everything from the Courtenay Place Chicken Palace, to the ugliest pigeon in Midland park. It’s dreamy paper collages and sticker charts. It’s hot pink nostalgia with attachment issues. It’s packed with feeling, sharp as teeth. It...

Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook 2025

For the 2025 edition of the Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, editor Tracey Slaughter has once again hit the zeitgeist in her selection of 141 new poems from an exhaustive submission process. Another packed issue, #59 showcases the raw and the vital — including from this year’s featured poet, Mark Prisco — and features a blistering introduction from Slaughter herself. In addition, there are excellent reviews of a crop of recent poetry books. With work by both established and emerging New Zealand poets, the Yearbook is essential reading for all poetry fans.