No Good

Sophievan Waardenberg is a writer from Tāmaki Makaurau. She holds an MFA from SyracuseUniversity where she was editor-in-chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her firstchapbook, ‘does a potato have a heart?’, was published in AUP New Poets 5(2019). Her poems about eating carbohydrates and kissing girls can be found in Cordite,Sweet Mammalian, The Spinoff and Best New Zealand Poems.

‘No Good isa psychologically astute, honed, vividly rendered collection from a strong,engaging new writer. It is technically taut; it confronts rough emotionalterritory in its overt articulation of longing, dejection, sorrow, melancholyand loss. Yet despite all this, it often sparkles with warmth, an irrepressiblesense of the whimsical and quirky, and with images as clear, unpretentious andstartlingly fresh as lawn daisies.’ — Emma Neale‘Sophie van Waardenberg’s debut makes good on allthe promise of her AUP New Poets 5 collection and appearances in NewZealand and US journals. No Good has the humour and heart-on-sleeveemotion displayed in her previously published work but makes use of the fullerscope of a book-length collection to take the reader into more complex andemotionally fraught territory. It is a book that can be both warm and (in thebest sense) difficult, frequently within the same poem or sequence. The firstfull collection by van Waardenberg is something that has been highlyanticipated by Aotearoa poetry fans for several years, and No Good is atriumphant blend of elegy and love poems, heartbreak and hope, journeys andhomecomings.’ — FrancisCooke