Paula Morris on overlooked titles from the past 12 months that deserve to be on your summer reading list
We live in strange times. At the height of the pandemic, lurching between lockdowns, writers with new books had a hard time of it: review outlets closing, copies stuckin foreign ports, residency opportunities paused, launches and festivals exiled online. This year, a return to almost-normal seemed possible. But a number of fine local books didn’t quite get their moments in a still-skittish spotlight.
One of the more eclectic is the Rough Lives Speak anthology, edited by Daren Kamali and David Eggleton. It features the work of the Street Poets and Artists Collective Enterprises (SPACE) — Richard Whelan, Tim Gray, Lana Te Rore, John Joseph Hughes, Ta Iuli and Richard Nightingale — developed during writing workshops offered at the Auckland City Mission and St Matthew-in-the-City. Eggleton is a former poet laureate and Kamali, Auckland Council’s Pacific Heritage Adviser, is an in-demand performance poet with a long-time interest in creating collectives of street poets. Together this year they took their Mad Doggerel Poetry Tour on the road with musician Richard Wallis.
Rough Lives Speak was well-supported by Auckland libraries, including an exhibition of Filipo Tu’u’s portraits of the poets. Phantom Billstickers created posters for some of the poems in the central city. The library was a natural hub for this project: as Kamali has noted, it is “rough sleeper-friendly”. Visceral and honest, the work in this book represents voices rarely heard, let alone published in a book. Rough Lives Speak deserves a wide audience for its songs of the street. Copies are available to borrow from Auckland Libraries.
Gina Cole, another Auckland writer with Pacific roots, published her debut novel this year: Na Viro (Huia, $35). It’s an imaginative work of speculative fiction that takes place 200 years in the future, with settings that include the Pacific Ocean and outer space. The title refers to a cosmic whirlpool that’s crucial to a story. Cole has coined the term “Pasifikafuturism” to describe her particular brand of sci-fi, suggesting a future for the region that transcends the wounds left by colonisation — from language loss to nuclear testing and the stripping of natural resources. It also informs a vision that combines space travel with traditional Pacific craft and navigation.
Na Viro.
Cole’s embrace of science fiction as a way of making sense of the high stakes of colonial history echoes that of Dominican writer Junot Diaz, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. The term “magic realism”, he’s said, doesn’t apply in his home region, where so many extraordinary and implausible things have happened. One person’s science fiction is another person’s Caribbean. Na Viro is both playful and deeply serious, re-visioning the great voyages of the Pacific in a post-apocalyptic, high-stakes world.
Down from Upland by Murdoch Stephens (Lawrence and Gibson, $25) is another spirited, unsettling story that didn’t get the sunshine it deserved this year. The novel is a sharp satire about the lanyard-wearers who stalk the streets of our capital city, propelled by coffee and bureaucratic double-speak.
At the heart of the story is Axle, a teenage boy, plagued by bullies at his old school and over-liberal millennial parents at home. Adults are the indulged class here, engrossed in their messy sex lives and observing “bisexuality visibility day” at their dry government jobs, not to mention foisting light beer on their teens. They act like neurotic teens themselves, while ignoring the climate-change fears of the next generation or providing any sort of consistent parenting. Everyone in Stephens’ novel is fumbling their way through life, though the teenage boys emerge as the least damaged, and often the only sensible ones in the room.
Kōhine
One last selection for 2022: Colleen Maria Lenihan’s luminous story collection Kōhine (Huia, $25). Unlike too many debut collections, Lenihan’s is ambitious, consistent in quality and accomplished in its storytelling, suggesting intense years of work on both art and craft. Many of the stories are set in Japan, where the author lived for over a decade, embracing the contradictory high and low cultures of the place — classical music, designer labels, strip clubs, love hotels—and revealing the isolation of life far from home in one of the world’s biggest cities. Kōhine is truly one of the best books of the year, linked stories that roam the oceans — and the night — and circle one inescapable tragedy. Like all the books on my list, it deserves a wide audience willing to ride its waves and discover compelling new voices — mermaids on the rocks luring us with their strange songs of beauty, duplicity and danger.
