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Toku Papa
(Trade Paperback / Paperback)
By Ruby, Solly
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- RRP: $25.00
- $21.25
- Save $3.75
- In Stock At Publisher
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When you first told me
that you gave me the name of our tupuna
so that I would be strong enough
to hold our family inside my ribcage,
I believed you.
Here you are.
Here is how I saw you,
trapped in your own amber.
Now it's time
for you to believe me.
Toku Papa is a bo...ok that serves as a map of survival for Maori growing up outside of their papakaika. These poems look at how we take the knowledge we are given by our ancestors and hide it beneath our tongues for safekeeping. They show us how we live with our tupuna, without ever fully understanding them. This book encompasses a journey spanning generations, teaching us how to keep the home fires burning within ourselves when we have forgotten where our homes are. But have our homes forgotten us?
'This book sings a song of connection and disconnection. It moves between the light and the dark as all living things must, and it stretches back to our ancestors and forward to our descendants, while exploring the difficulties of loving those who we should be closest to. This is a searching and generous collection of toikupu that slow time to a trickle just to reach in and tap directly into the wairua.' -essa may ranapiri
'Ruby is an incredible poet. Her poetry is utterly deft and agile, warm and heartbreaking.' -Tayi Tibble, Toi Maori Aotearoa Read more
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science educator in domestic chaos fetishises Scandinavian furniture and champagne flutes. A group of white-collar deadbeats attend a swinger's party in the era of drunk Muldoon. A pervasive smell seeps through the walls of a German housing block. A seabird performs at an open-mi...c night. Bug Week is a scalpel-clean examination of male entitlement, a dissection of death, an agar plate of mundanity. From 1960s Wellington to post-Communist Germany, Bug Week traverses the weird, the wry and the grotesque in a story collection of human taxonomy. Airini Beautrais was born in Auckland in 1982. Her work has appeared in a range of journals and anthologies in Aotearoa and elsewhere. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Flow: Whanganui River Poems (VUP, 2017). Her first collection, Secret Heart (VUP, 2006), won the Jessie Mackay Award for First Book of Poetry at the 2007 NZ Book Awards. In 2016 she won the Landfall Essay Prize. She has also been a judge for a number of awards, including the 2018 Ockham NZ Book Awards. She lives in Whanganui with her two sons and two cats. Read more
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Thirty-one exhilarating new stories from the acclaimed author of deleted scenes for lovers:
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Danyl McLauchlan wanted to get closer to the hidden truth of things. But it was starting to look like the hidden truth of things was that nothing was real, everything was suffering, and he didn't really exist.
In these essays Danyl explores ideas and paths that he hopes will m...ake him freer and happier - or, at least, less trapped, less medicated and less depressed. He stays at a monastery and meditates for eight hours a day. He spends time with members of a new global movement who try to figure out how to do the most possible good in the world. He reads forbiddingly complex papers on neuroscience and continental philosophy and shovels clay with a Buddhist monk until his hands bleed. He tries to catch a bus.
Tranquillity and Ruin is a light-hearted contemplation of madness, uncertainty and doom. It's about how, despite everything we think we know about who we are, we can still be surprised by ourselves.
'McLauchlan is likely the most intelligent essayist in New Zealand . . . and this is likely to be the most thought-provoking book of non-fiction published in New Zealand in 2021.' -Steve Braunias, ReadingRoom Read more
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'Zum Bullshitter geht der Preis' - so said the great German author-philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774). Or did he? Can we trust what we never quite knew about because we never quite got around to reading it in the first place? Is it saf...e to rely on what we overhear in the university common-room or even out there in the real world? And does it matter? In Bluffworld we are taken through the bildung of a master-bluffer, from his early days spent plagiarising student essays to his magisterial later lectures on the opening sentence of Moby-Dick and other works he's been led to believe might well be great literature, whatever that is. We learn to spot the difference between bullshit and horseshit, to understand the power of seeming, to use 'Quite' and 'Just so' to trigger verbal smokescreens when outflanked, to sense the sublime power of unoriginality all around us. Finally, we see the inevitable terminus ad quem (whatever that means) of the Meister-Bullshit-Kunstler(?), as our hero confronts the apotheosis of bullshit in the bewildering word-world of the corporate university. All this and much, much less! Time for another all-staff barbecue! Read more
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By Avia, Tusiata
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- RRP: $25.00
- $21.25
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- In Stock At Publisher
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Kneel like a prayer full of lynching
This is my God-given white
'Savage is as savage does. And we're all implicated. Avia breaks the colonial lens wide open. We peer through its poetic shards and see a savage world - outside, inside. With characteristic savage and stylish w...it, Avia holds the word-blade to our necks and presses with a relentless grace. At the end, you'll feel your pulse anew.' -Selina Tusitala Marsh, New Zealand Poet Laureate 2017-19
The voices of Tusiata Avia are infinite. She ranges from vulnerable to forbidding to celebratory with forms including pantoums, prayers and invocations. And in this electrifying new work, she gathers all the power of her voice to speak directly into histories of violence. Read more
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'I'd wanted to remember why it was we swam in the first place - to remember the pleasure of immersing in an element other than air.'
Ingrid Horrocks had few aspirations to swimming mastery, but she had always loved being in the water. She set out on a solo swimming journey, th...en abandoned it for a different kind of swimming altogether - one which led her to more deeply examine relationships, our ecological crisis, and responsibilities to collective care. Why do people swim, and where, how, with whom?
Where We Swim ranges from solitary swims in polluted lakes and rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, to swims in pools in Medellin, Phoenix and the Peruvian Amazon. Near Brighton, Horrocks is joined by an imagined community of early women swimmers; back home she takes her first tentative swim after lockdown. Part memoir, part travel and nature writing, this book is about being a daughter, sister, partner, mother, and above all a human animal living among other animals - sheep and cows, whales and manatee, elks and ibises.
'Where We Swim is a book about family that travels by water in the body of a swimmer. Horrocks is someone with an appetite for adventure but she is also the mother of young children and daughter of older parents. She brilliantly contrasts heady plunges of bodily experience with chilling alarms about family. This book is filled with wanderlust, but also homesickness for a past when our waterways didn't have high coliform counts and Wellington's bays weren't soupy with saIp, and for the whole swimmable world it so vividly remembers.' -Elizabeth Knox Read more
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Moving away from Munich isn't nearly as wrenching an experience for Frau Greta Hahn as she had feared. Their new home is even lovelier than the one they left behind, and best of all - right on their doorstep - are some of the finest craftsmen from all over Europe, prepared to mak...e for her and the other officers' wives living in this small community anything they could possibly desire: new curtains from the finest silks, furniture designed to the most exacting specifications, execute a fresco or a mural even. The looming presence of the nearby prison camp - lying just beyond a patch of forest - is the only blot to mar what is otherwise an idyllic life in Buchenwald. Frau Hahn's husband, SS Sturmbannfuhrer Dietrich Hahn, has taken up a powerful new position as camp administrator. The job is all consuming as he wrestles with corruption that is rife at every level, inadequate supplies, and a sewerage system under ever-growing strain as the prison population continues to rise. Frau Hahn's obliviousness is challenged when she is forced into an unlikely alliance with one of Buchenwald's prisoners, Dr Lenard Weber. A decade earlier he invented a machine - the Sympathetic Vitaliser - that at the time he believed could cure cancer. Does the machine work? Whether it does or not, it might yet save a life. Read more
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By Fleur, Adcock
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- RRP: $25.00
- $21.25
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Fleur Adcock began writing the poems in this book when she was 82. The two chief settings are New Zealand, with its multi-coloured seas, and Britain, seen in various decades. There are foreign travels, flirtations, family memories, deaths and conversations with the dead. Katherin...e Mansfield, incognito, dodges an academic conference; there's a lesson in water divining as well as a rather unusual Christmas party. We meet several varieties of small mammal, numerous birds, doomed or otherwise, and some sheep. The book ends with a sequence in memory of her friend, the poet Roy Fisher. Read more
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Too stuffy inside? All those familiar social realist furnishings, all those comfortable literary tropes.
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