AUP New Poets 8

Lilting bees and unidentifiable birds, long-division problems and continental cornflakes: three remarkable voices arrive in AUP New Poets 8. In AUP New Poets 8, Lily Holloway, Tru Paraha, and Modi Deng come together to produce a volume of remarkable inventions and intoxications. Lily Holloway leads off with her collection ‘a child in that alcove,’ using an inventive approach to form to lead the reader into the ordinary extraordinary events of daily life, her poetry filling them with dazzle and dread, questions and memories. Then Tru Paraha takes us inside ‘my darkling universe’—a world ‘perpetually astral’ and ‘utterly spaghettified,’ a poetic universe of unexpected letters and words and forms, where te reo Maori collides with atomic chemistry. Finally, Modi Deng travels through time and space into the lives of Brahms and backpackers, where uneasy conversations between mothers and children, between ‘the subjects and myself,’ between Beijing and London, provide beauty and solace. Three new voices, three compelling visions, all bound together in AUP New Poets 8.

Anna Jackson made her debut in AUP New Poets 1 before publishing six collections with Auckland University Press, including I, Clodia, and Other Portraits (2014). She has a DPhil from Oxford and is now an associate professor in English literature at Victoria University of Wellington. Jackson is the author of Diary Poetics: Form and Style in Writers' Diaries 1915–1962 (Routledge, 2010) and, with Charles Ferrall, British Juvenile Fiction 1850–1950: The Age of Adolescence (Routledge, 2009). Lily Holloway (born in 1998, she / they) is a queer writer and postgraduate English student. While she mostly writes poetry, she has also tried her hand at non-fiction, fiction and playwriting. You can find her work in places like Starling, Midway Journal, Scum, The Pantograph Punch and The Spinoff amongst various other literary nooks and crannies. In 2020 she was honoured to receive the Shimon Weinroth Prize in Poetry, the Kendrick Smithyman Scholarship in Poetry and second place in the Charles Brasch Young Writers’ Essay Competition. Modi Deng is a pianist based in London, currently pursuing postgraduate performance studies on a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music. Her Chinese name ?? means ‘silent flute’, which her father drew from a poem by Tagore. Performances with her ensemble, the Korimako Trio, have taken her throughout the UK and her concerts have been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and RNZ Concert. After growing up in Dunedin, she went on to complete a Master of Music with First Class Honours on a Marsden research scholarship, while completing a Bachelor of English at the University of Auckland. Tru Paraha resides in Tamaki Makaurau in the suburb of Tukituki Muka (aka Herne Bay). She works as a choreographer and director, having enjoyed an extensive career in experimental dance, theatre and audio-visual arts. She is currently in the final year of a postdoctoral research fellowship in the English and Drama department at the University of Auckland. Moving between choreography, philosophy and creative writing, Tru produces live performances, artists’ pages and poems drawing on materials from deep space.