Description

‘Without doubt the most arresting and original new young poet, on the page and in performance’ – Carol Ann Duffy

A Sunday Times Book of the Year and New Zealand’s best-selling collection, from the unstoppable force behind such poems as ‘Monica’ (the one from Friends) and ‘Keats is Dead so F**k Me from Behind’

this impressive debut has established Hera Lindsay Bird as a good girl……with many beneficial thoughts and feelings……

with themes as varied as snow and tears, the poems in this collection shine with the fantastic cream of who she is…………….juxtaposing many classical and modern breezes

Bird turns her prescient eye on love and loss, and what emerges is like a helicopter in fog……or a bejewelled Christmas sleigh, gliding triumphantly through the contemporary aesthetic desert………

this is at once an intelligent and compelling fantasy of tenderness……

heart-breaking and charged with trees……without once sacrificing the forest…………

whether you are masturbating luxuriously in your parents’ sleepout……….

……….or pushing a pork roast home in a vintage pram……………….

this is the book for you………………………………………

heroically and compulsively stupid…………………………………………………………

…………………………………………………..whipping you once again into medieval sunlight.

PRAISE FOR HERA LINDSAY BIRD

‘I think there’s a pretty strong case which suggests Hera Lindsay Bird is like the most exciting newish poet in NZ’ – Steve Braunias

‘Hi, dear, we have to say how much we enjoyed, if right word, the Hate poem. Really made us think, loved the line about the ancient cannon’ – Text message from Ashleigh Young’s mum

‘The wickedest problem in Hera Lindsay Bird is not sex but taste’ – John Newton

Publisher Review

Frank and outrageous ... it has made me, like many others, more excited about poetry than I have been in a long time * Guardian * Full of outrageous guilty pleasures. She writes with the cheek of Frank O'Hara * Telegraph * Funny, clever and deadpan and kept me hanging on every line ... Her writing has a freshness and straightforwardness that strides confidently off the page -- Jon McGregor * Observer * The deadpan comic bravado of the New Zealand poet Hera Lindsay Bird looks literary decorum in the eye and dares it to blush -- Jeremy Noel-Tod * Sunday Times * A literary phenomenon ... goofy, funny and tender, her energy and sensitivity will captivate * Elle * Without doubt the most arresting and original new young poet, on the page and in performance -- Carol Ann Duffy