If We Knew How to We Would

Häftad, Engelska, 2025

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I am an unmade bed. I am a single thing made up of many other things. I am a reason, a raising, a roof to be raised. I am a song you sing in your sleep. I am a collection of dots. I am a need you buried in the back garden. I am a literal spray of light across a wooden floor in a house where the sun has only just returned. I am a musical phrase. I am a lead light. I am a host. I am seven different names. I am all the fat in my body. I am the sky when it is early spring and I can’t believe I exist in this colour range. I am so blue.If We Knew How to We Would answers a question nobody asked: How many thoughts can you work into a single poem?Through breakups and a pandemic, health issues and deaths, Emma Barnes’s second collection is a riveting, overflowing and grief-stricken reckoning with the ordinary: a skinful of spit; insides scooped out with a melon baller; cracked like an egg and nothing inside. ‘It is too much to say nothing about. It is nothing to say too much about.’

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2025-09-11
Mått150 x 238 x 6 mm
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor80
FörlagAuckland University Press
ISBN9781776711888

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Poesi inom Skonlitteratur

Emma Barnes (Pākehā, they/them) studied at the University of Canterbury and lives in Aro Valley, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. Their poetry has been published in journals including Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau, Cordite and Best New Zealand Poems (2008, 2010, 2021). They performed in Show Ponies in 2022 and 2023. They are the author of the poetry collection I Am in Bed with You (AUP, 2021) and co-editor with Chris Tse of Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa (AUP, 2021). They work in tech and spend a lot of time picking up heavy things and putting them back down again.

‘I’m excited by the restless curiosity and energy and linguistic do-it-yourself grab-bagging expansiveness of Barnes’s poetics. They have very energetic ears, tuning into jargon and cliché and tender private moments and everything in between, all the way from the boardroom or the IT training centre to the Tinder date or the living room. And the poems, taken together, move in ways that work as a collection.’