Dani Yourukova
Hungus by Amber Esau (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2026), 128pp, $30; My Body is a Horror Film by Ray Shipley (Ngā Pukapuka Pekapeka, 2025), 36pp, $17; Giving Birth to My Father by Tusiata Avia (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2025), 112pp, $30
When you read three poetry collections in the space of a single weekend, I think it’s inevitable that you begin to draw connections between them (particularly once you’re done devouring them whole and begin dipping back into more organised, restrained readings). These are three very different artists, and three very different books, but each of them, in turn, orbits the problem of the body: its lines and edges and possibilities, what it is and isn’t capable of, how we might live or die in it.
In Amber Esau’s debut collection, Hungus, the first body we encounter is on the book’s jacket. It’s lurid green and segmented. Rather than limiting the anatomy to either human or insectoid, Katrina Steak’s cover-art depiction of the Mantis (a central figure in the mythology of Hungus) borrows the iconography of both. She has compound eyes, antennae, breasts, wings, thighs, a soft little fold of belly fat, one human hand and a raptorial forearm, bejewelled boots, nipple piercings and a massive knife. The Mantis has it all. It’s a playful image, combining a performed high-femme aesthetic with a sharp, monstrous otherness. It isn’t always clear where the body ends, and the jewels begin.
In the text, the Mantis embodies all the sexuality, glamour and violence the cover image promises. She ‘moans into the mic’ until everyone’s hot for her ‘sexy thorax’, and she cuts up baby sharks with a machete. Like her namesake species, we assume she is a sexual cannibal, but in Hungus, hunger is no twinge of appetite. It is all-encompassing, sometimes mythic in scope. There are bellies full of starlings, and beings with many faces that eat with two mouths. In the sky, the sun is ‘a rotting orange / in the corner of a fogged fruit drawer’; Maui chops fatumoa, where the knife lines are ‘dark pink’, and ‘chewy, but wannabe crunchy, like cartilage’. Food and other forms of consumption are viscerally, sensorially present throughout the collection, sometimes appetising, sometimes repellent, and often occupying a kind of queasy mediation between the two. In a surprisingly tender image, the baby Mantis has a backpack full of ice creams, which she shares with the other kids at school, but when she eats, she still ‘eats it whole, including the foil.’
In a world that revolves profoundly around hunger, it shouldn’t be surprising that the Mantis occupies a spiritual realm as well as a mythic one. She speaks to identity, hybridity, power and sex, but equally to imagination, transcendence and the creative drive. In ancient Greek, a mantis was a seer and a prophet before she was an insect, and when she first appears by name in this collection, she’s right next to Maui. She hangs out with angels, shifts through time, and bathes in the garden of the Aitu. She occupies many worlds, just as she inhabits many poems, and though ‘Mantis’ is often given the definite article ‘the’ throughout the collection, there are a multitude of her kind.
The resounding question is: ‘Who’s the Mantis though? Who?’ It’s tempting to read the Mantis as a poet (a performer of many selves and faces, a mediator of worlds, an outpouring of desire), but the negotiation between these worlds, the between-ness of the Mantis herself, is complicated and deliberately, playfully evasive:
‘The problem,’ one of the Minor Mantises,
Paranoia, says, ‘It’s not that we don’t belong
anywhere. It’s that we know
they watch us everywhere.’
The Mantis philosophises mid-discussion, without inviting the reader into the intricacies discussed beforehand. It defies the easy reading that ‘the problem’ might be an issue of identity and otherness, and Uno reverses the responsibility onto the observers. This unseen ‘they’ might be a sort of figment, an unseen persecutor (this Mantis is called ‘Paranoia’, after all), but as a reader, you inherently occupy the position of unseen observer. So it feels a little like the Mantis might have seen you. You, personally. And the Mantis has opinions about your engagement with the work. It’s defiant, deft and delivered with real humour that never entirely lets anyone off the hook:
The other Mantises are too busy
looking at themselves. Typical.
One of the real pleasures of Hungus is its joyous sense of excess, which rings through the imagery and iconography. The whole collection is absolutely lush with sonic pleasures and extravagant cascades of surprising juxtapositions: heads that melt together like crayons, a ‘weak-bladdered moon’ that ‘leaks all over’, supermarket chickens bathed in ‘yellow, intestinal light’. It’s a startling and expansive debut, filled with exuberant lyricism and a hybrid lexicon of being and desire. It invites you to the feast. It sticks in your throat like a bone.
· · ·
Ray Shipley’s My Body is a Horror Film is a chapbook-length collection that positions the queer body, metaphorically and metatextually, at the centre of an artistic project. With humour, hope and self-awareness, the poems wend their way through divorce and dysphoria, using declarative titles such as ‘On being a marriage celebrant after the dissolution of my own marriage’ and ‘Some day, I’ll love Ray Shipley’. The book feels a little loose and prosy in places, but always personable and lively, as it walks the fine balance between vulnerability and self-aware performativity:
O, the dream-like romance of the opening scene of my
body! The foreshadowing soundtrack!
The suspecting viewer!
Though the ‘horror’ of the collection’s title evokes blood, fear, lurking monsters, masked murderers, danger and ultimate death, when we arrive at this first poetic fragment, the language is overtly romantic. Not only in its literal reference to romance, but in that ecstatic ‘O’, which brings to mind the classical tradition of odes and adoration: Keats and his urn, or Shelley and the west wind (‘thou breath of Autumn’s being’!). We should note, however, that this ‘O’ is addressed not to the body itself, but to the act of framing it. With the ‘foreshadowing’ and that ‘suspecting viewer’, it is possible that the body might not get out of this alive.
The following excerpt is from an untitled sequence that recurs throughout the collection and forms its structural throughline. Each poem in the sequence follows the same approximate format. They’re short and evocative, filled with exclamation marks and cheeky metaphors that juxtapose enthusiasm with the moody trappings of the horror film. As the sequence goes on, the body (‘my body’) is subjected to classic horror-film tropes in a series of escalating, absurd comparisons and exclamations:
O! The flickering glow on the dark highway on my body!
O! My body is an ocean at dusk, and also the abandoned
diver!O! My body is a haunted hotel, and every room
is absolutely a trap!
These short poems are charming and funny in their own right, but they’re also a joyous reframing of the narrative of the horror film. Yes, there is still lurking danger, which is appropriate to the genre, but this film is ‘Written, directed, produced by, and starring Ray Shipley’, where the queer body can be the house, the monster and the camera, as well as the victim inside.
· · ·
Tusiata Avia’s sixth and most recent collection, Giving Birth to My Father, is a dense and potent work that takes the form of a non-linear narrative sequence about the death of a father. The book is divided into six sections, the first of which is titled ‘This is how it was supposed to go’, which should be pretty definitive in terms of what it says about the factual reliability of the next few poems. Yet it’s easy to be drawn into the long, immersive, scene-setting lines of ‘The Ceremony’: the concrete detail of ‘the Fanta bottle with the $10 note’; the hypnotic repeated motion of the fue (orator-chief’s ceremonial fly whisk):
‘whisk whisk’
So I let the orator’s imagery carry me through. I ‘watch the poetry glitter off his teeth’ (and I suspect you will too).
The section entitled ‘The Body’ begins with the ritual dressing of the father’s body, and ends with another body entirely. A different father. A different child. This shift in memory takes us to the perspective of Poluleuligaga, son of the cannibal king Malietoa Faiga, as he encounters two young people crying on the beach. They tell him they are soon to be killed and eaten. The story goes that he is moved by this and intercedes with his father on their behalf:
And the next day, when the food baskets
were laid down and unwrapped,
the face of Poluleuligaga looked up into the cannibal king’s eyes.
The final poem in this short section is called ‘But it didn’t happen like that’. As well as reminding us of the fundamental nature of the fantasy in ‘The Body’, it signals a startling shift in perspective and time, introducing the first-person pronoun and bringing us into a closer psychic distance with the poem’s narrator:
Now, I am the poet-orator.
Now, I am Poluleuligaga lying in the food basketlooking with the eyes of a cooked shark
into the face of the cannibal king.
Shifts and reversals through bodies and time abound in this collection. In the following section (‘This is how it went’), we find a less idealised version of the funeral, complete with family politics, difficult personalities, mutual antagonism and characters who are wrenchingly recognisable in their imperfect responses to grief.
This next beginning is an account of the father birthing himself ‘out of this world’, in a torrent of prose almost unpunctuated but for the poetic ‘/’ that signals our opportunity to breathe. Though a literal reading tells us that the father is suffering a fatal illness, the language of birth animates this narrative with strangeness and a paradoxical sense of time. The ‘birthing’ father becomes an ambiguous mother figure, while the poet-orator’s presence at the scene suggests that they both predate and survive their father simultaneously. The poem concludes with another nested, paradoxical shift, as the poet wishes they could hold their father inside their own body:
‘Perhaps you are too big to fit inside the cage of my frame / or perhaps you are like the frigate bird carved into the outside of my hand / flying back and forth between this world and that/’
The body, it seems, cannot contain the outer limits of what another person is to us. But even when he is gone, the father doesn’t simply pass into another world: he passes ‘back and forth’. Sometimes he is a solid body, entombed; sometimes a memory of Brylcreemed hair; sometimes he appears after death. The collection is as interested in what comes after (and before) loss as in the loss itself. It posits that the temporal relationship between the self and grief is more complicated than simply ‘before’ and ‘after’.
It’s a kind of small grief to end your time with this book, to close its pages. It’s such a rich collection, and it rewards close, careful attention. It will take you to the edge of various waters, to Sāmoa, to the heart of grief, to the past, to the underworld itself, and back. Back and forth like the frigate bird.
DANI YOURUKOVA is a Wellington-based writer of poetry, essays, scripts, short fiction and reviews. They completed a Master of Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2021. Their work has appeared in a range of journals and publications, and their debut poetry collection, Transposium, was published by Auckland University Press in 2023.
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