Sick Power Trip

by Kennedy, Erik

• ISBN13: 9781776922901
• ISBN10: 1776922905
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2025-10-09
• Publisher: Te Herenga Waka University Press

Summary

I stored my plan for world peace safely in my coat pocket, and then I washed the coat. Sick Power Trip is Erik Kennedy’ s most personal and vulnerable book yet. These are poems that tell us: the world is unwell, and sometimes writers are, too. Kennedy scrutinises the broken social contract and the dangerous actors who seem determined to dominate us, and writes with open eyes about long COVID and living wages, self-medication and sea temperatures. If it feels like we’ re stuck in a post-truth moment, Kennedy reminds us that some things remain true and vital: self-care, empathy, and solidarity.

Author Biography

Erik Kennedy is a poet who lives in Otautahi Christchurch. He co-edited No Other Place to Stand, an anthology of climate change poetry from Aotearoa and the Pacific (Auckland University Press, 2022). His poetry chapbook Twenty-Six Factitions was published with Cold Hub Press in 2017, and his first full collection, There's No Place Like the Internet in Springtime, was shortlisted for the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry in 2019; this was followed by his collection Another Beautiful Day Indoors (2022). His latest poetry collection is Sick Power Trip (2025).

Table of Contents

Contents 1 Individualistic Societies Loneliness Studies Animals on Leads The Health Benefits of Winter Sea Bathing I Like Rich People, but I Couldn’ t? Eat a Whole One Myself All Submarine Movies Are Christmas Movies Pacific Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies People Who Can’ t Take Compliments Bildungsroman Why Your Utopia Sucks The Human Christmas Tree Horses in the Dark 2 Low-Carbon Warfare 3 This Usually Represents a Desire to Achieve Greatness? in Your Social or Professional Life What Thinking Feels Like The Summer We All Called Cigarettes ‘ Snargers’ Reviewing the Fleet DARVO The $6 Pepper Song Everyone’ s Trying on Their Old Nuclear War Poems Pension Poetics Enclosure of the Commons II Sleeping with the Window Wide Open My Recollection of How It Went Notes Towards a Theory of Fun How a Year Ends 4 Bino Soft Power 5 Self-Defining Hippiedom Discourse Gap in My CV Classic Car Magazines Magpie Moth vs Monarch Butterfly Refining the Concept Public Coughs I’ ve Been Huddling in Doorways Getting Some Fresh Air in the Middle of ?the Workday Pet Theories Ill and Travelling Consolations The Limited Imagination Allegory Autumn Couplets 6 We’ ve All Been There An Only Child Poem A Nineteenth-Century Love Song Heathcote and Horotane Bystander Poem; or a Gaza Poem Living Wage Negations Talking in the Corner with the Miniature Golf? Course Designer Shop Floor Layout Algorithm The Foraging Poem 2024 Someone Put an Ancient Burial Ground Right? Where a Hotel Needs to Go Self-Affirming Mantra Sources for ‘ Low-Carbon Warfare’ Notes and Acknowledgements