AUP New Poets 10

Tessa Keenan (Te Ātiawa) is from Taranaki and is now based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She would like to thank her whānau, partner, friends and tūpuna for the constant inspiration and support during the writing of her chapbook. Her poems have appeared in Starling, a fine line, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and Pūhia.romesh dissanayake is a writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. His work has appeared in The Spinoff, The Pantograph Punch, Enjoy Contemporary Art Space and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand (edited by Paula Morris and Alison Wong). His first novel, When I open the shop, was the winner of the 2022 Modern Letters Fiction Prize and is forthcoming from THWUP in 2024.Sadie Lawrence is a second-year university student of creative writing and media studies. Like Human Girls / all we have is noise was written from ages seventeen to nineteen. Her autism screening was inconclusive.

‘This is an exciting new collection of poems in the AUP New Poets series. Tessa Keenan writes poetry as a kind of lyrical essayist with the work moving between a very contemporary moment and a powerful sense of history and place that gives these moments depth and resonance. romesh dissanayake offers a different soundscape, palate and set of visual references, dropping in and out of a social media register with a very effective performativity. And Sadie Lawrence’s poems are full of movement and surprise, as adjectives become verbs, patterns are set up and broken, and details linger in the mind. She conveys the visceral, messy realities of adolescent life, along with its energy and charm, in strikingly fresh and original work.’ — Anna Jackson