Books published by Victoria University Press

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
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Thirty-one exhilarating new stories from the acclaimed author of deleted scenes for lovers:

'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!
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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
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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.
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