Böcker av Emma Neale

Strong Words 3 showcases the best of the best of Aotearoa New Zealand's contemporary essays from 2021 and 2022, selected from entries into the Landfall Essay Competition. Strong Words 3 is packed with Aotearoa New Zealand's most compelling new writing on contemporary issues, tackling topics such as grief, lost language, poetic childhood recollections, gender, the long aftermath of colonisation, the nature of traumatic memory, and working as a comedian while solo parenting.

Landfall is New Zealand's foremost and longest-running arts and literary journal. It showcases new fiction and poetry, as well as biographical and critical essays, and cultural commentary. Each issue brims with a mix of vital new work by this country's best writers. There are reviews of the latest books, art, film, drama, and dance. Landfall is a high-quality production, with artist portfolios in full colour.

Emma Neale creates shape-shifting poems that confound prejudices and subvert expectations. The striking imagery and emotional range of her work challenge the open and latent violence of contemporary life, from refugee crises to rape, poverty, and mental illness to climate change, while revealing the extraordinary in the everyday. Whimiscal typographical experiments and prose poems sit next to reimagined fables, deliciously light-handed satire, and quietly powerful insights into the contemporary political terrain.

In this follow-up collection to the award-winning The Truth Garden, Emma Neale asks where exactly do the personal and the political drop hands? In poems that are engaged, compelling, witty and moving, she looks at how we navigate a true line through the psychological, environmental, social and economic anxieties of our times. The book examines love in its many guises, and also energetically responds to the distractions and delights of the digital age. Writing of Emma Neale''s ''kitchen-familiar and cosmic-wide attentions'', Poet Laureate Vincent O''Sullivan has said, ''There is something so celebratory about Emma Neale''s poetry, about its eager, informed, needle-eyed engagement with the contemporary world [She runs] the hot thread of linguistic flare and precision through whatever occasion she takes up.''