He's performing the poems in music venues around the country, with a singer-songwriter as the opening act, thus breaking down some of those barriers between different performance arts.
When we meet for a chat before soundcheck on the eve of his first show, it's easily apparent that the Grey Lynn native is not necessarily the wholly wayward persona that some of his visceral, earthy, dark writing about sex and transgressions, or socioeconomics and art, might conjure.
That's not to say those words ignore his human complexities, but they don't often highlight Hoey's more genial side - his easy manners, or, for example, the fact that he's working on a mentorship programme for troubled teens.
You can tell he's dead excited about the book, too - something he's been working on with illustrator, tattoo artist and friend, Joshua Solomon, for some time.
"It's quite surreal, you know, we hand-typed it [on a typewriter] and cut all the illustrations out by hand. It just took so long. But it had to be ready for the tour, so it gave us a bit of a crazy deadline, and I'm very happy to have it done."
Hoey has always juggled writing both poetry and raps, but each has been in favour on and off as he's become better at one or the other.
"When I first got better at rapping, I wasn't doing a lot of poetry, but then I started entering [poetry] slam competitions because the money was good, and I started winning. That makes me sound like a bit of a dick, but I just didn't really respect the culture of poetry at first. But really, I guess it's been in the last five years that I realised I wanted to get really good.
"When I performed with Sam Hunt last year, the first show we did, I was a bit cocky, and I thought, 'Aw yeah, I'll just do whatever', but he got up and just totally schooled me. So for the second show I did I just practised and practised like I never practised before, and I wrote all new stuff, and I kind of held my own to some extent. So from then on really, I was like, 'okay, this is a serious thing, I'm going to stop f***ing around, cos I'm not getting any younger."'
As to whether or not each discipline influences the other, Hoey thinks it's unavoidable that his experience with both mediums gives him a different perspective.
"I guess I always try to make my poetry flow, perhaps more so than someone who doesn't have a rapping background, and vice versa I try to make sure my raps have cool language, and play with the words more."
One key difference is that there are some poems Hoey writes that he doesn't expect to perform, and equally he feels there are others which come across brilliantly live that might not have the same impact on the page. But he likes challenging himself to make them work in each context.
"The funnier, maybe more extreme ones, the ones with the tricky language or the jokes sometimes work better live. I guess it's the ones that are really, really personal - they are usually more for the page I guess, and the stuff about sex usually ends up being for the page too, because New Zealanders can be funny about that kind of thing."
He's also distinctly aware of how he uses humour in his poetry, because although there's plenty of room for laughs (and his poems display a talent for quick, and dry observation), he doesn't want to be a stand-up comedian.
"I love stand-up comedy, but it's a craft and I don't know it. I definitely enjoy comedy and really admire a lot of comedians, but their depth of understanding of what they do, I'm not anywhere on that level."
He is clearly making a name as a poet though, and slowly stepping into the arts world - something that he finds fascinating and perplexing at the same time, for its contrast to the world of hip-hop.
"If you can get into the arts world, it's like, 'Woah!' People pay you and look after you and respect you. As a musician, you turn up somewhere, it's often, 'Here's your free beer, now go and perform and we might give you 50 bucks.' Of course there is money to be made in music, but often times, I guess especially as a rapper, you're not treated with much respect, whereas the art world is the opposite of that, so I would like to get more involved in that. Everyone wants to be taken seriously.
"Every time you meet someone and say you're a rapper, the attitude is quite different to when you say you're a poet."
He feels there's something of a renaissance happening in the art of poetry too, a greater, wider interest in it, and more people seeing it as a meaningful, useful way of communicating.
"I think more people are absorbing it, writing it, watching it. Throughout history, poetry has had its heyday during the most crazy, unstable times, so it makes sense that it's happening again now."
Who: Tourettes, rapper and poet.
What: New book Party Tricks And Boring Secrets
Where and when: Performing spoken word sets at Leigh Sawmill on Friday evening and at Portland Public House in Kingsland on Saturday evening.
- TimeOut
