Join Unity Books & Victoria University Press for the launch of

POUKAHANGATUS by Tayi Tibble

&

PEOPLE FROM THE PIT STAND UP by Sam Duckor-Jones

Thursday 12th July, 6-7:30pm
In-store at Unity Books
57 Willis Street, Wellington

Poūkahangatus

‘This collection speaks about beauty, activism, power and popular culture with compelling guile, a darkness, a deep understanding and sensuality. It dives through noir, whakamā and kitsch and emerges dripping with colour and liquor. There’s whakapapa, funk (in all its connotations) and fetishisation. The poems map colonisation of many kinds through intergenerational, indigenous domesticity, sex, image and disjunction. They time-travel through the powdery mint-green 1960s and the polaroid sunshine 1970s to the present day. Their language and forms are liquid—sometimes as lush as what they describe, other times deliberately biblical or oblique. It all says: here is a writer who is experiencing herself as powerful, restrained but unafraid, already confident enough to make a phat splash on the page.’
—Hinemoana Baker

Tayi Tibble (Te Whānau ā Apanui/Ngāti Porou) was born in 1995 and lives in Wellington. In 2017 she completed a Masters in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington, where she was the recipient of the Adam Foundation Prize. Poūkahangatus is her first book.

Cover by Xoë Hall

People From The Pit Stand Up

This is the voice of someone who is both at home and not at home in the world. Sam Duckor-Jones’s wonderfully fresh, funny, dishevelled poems are alive with art-making and fuelled by a hunger for intimacy. Giant clay men lurk in salons, the lawns of poets overgrow, petrolheads hoon along the beach, birds cry ‘wow-okay, wow-okay, wow-okay’.

‘Gorgeous and contrary.’
—Jenny Bornholdt

‘If attention is an act of love, then this is a collection that attends to art and life in such a way as to collapse any distinction between the two.’
—Chris Price

Sam Duckor-Jones is a sculptor and poet who lives in Featherston. He won the Biggs Poetry Prize from Victoria University of Wellington in 2017. ​People from the Pit Stand Up​ is his first book.

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