Wendy Parkins on The Beautiful Afternoon by Airini Beautrais
Māori Literary Currents
Gina Cole on Te Awa o Kupu edited by Vaughan Rapatahana and Kiri Piahana-Wong
A Depressive Woman in a Hot Pool
Chris Else on The Waters by Carl Nixon
The Burning City
Tim Jones on You Are My Sunshine and other stories by Octavia Cade
You Don’t Look Like A Doctor, You Don’t Look Māori: Odd Because I Am A Doctor, I Am Māori, And This Is What I Look Like
Vaughan Rapatahana on Hiwa: Contemporary Māori short stories edited by Paula Morris and Darryn Joseph
The Past Is Heavy Only If You Hold On To It
Rachel O’Connor on Kōhine by Colleen Maria Lenihan
R U Ok?
Airini Beautrais on Ruin and Other Stories by Emma Hislop
In Yellow Shoes Walking through a Field of Daffodils
Kay McKenzie Cooke on The Wandering Nature of Us Girls by Frankie McMillan
The Person is Fashioned and the Poem is Shaped until Poem and Person are One
Piet Nieuwland on Albatross Neck: Landings by the Ancient Mariner and Romanticism in Aotearoa New Zealand 1770–2022 by Nigel Brown and Denys Trussell; The Wanderer: Book Two by Ron Riddell; Songs to the Unsung by Kayleen M. Hazlehurst
From the Motley of Unscripted Life
Philip Temple on Return to Harikoa Bay by Owen Marshall
Short Stories, Big Pictures
Iona Winter on Beats of the Pa’u by Maria Samuela; Peninsula by Sharron Came
Six of the Best
Charlotte Grimshaw on Six by Six: Short stories by New Zealand’s best writers, ed. Bill Manhire