#rangikura

[aaknopf]

A poem of girlhood and after by Indigenous New Zealander Tayi Tibble, whose second collection, Rangikura, comes out in America today. In the dictionary of Māori language, hōmiromiro is defined as “a white-breasted North Island tomtit…a little black-and-white bird with a large head and short tail.” It is often used to refer to someone with a tomtit’s keen vision—that is, a sharp eye for detail.

Hōmiromiro

I used to dream about a two-headed goldfish. I took it for an omen. I smashed a milk bottle open

on a boiling road and watched a three-legged dog lick it up and in the process I became not myself but a single shard of glass and thought finally

I had starved myself skinny enough to slip into the splits of the universe but once I did I realised that the universe was no place for a young thing to be and there is always a lot more starving to be had.

When I was a girl I thought

I was Daisy Buchanan. I read on the train. I made voluminous eyes.

Once I walked in front of a bus and it exploded into a million monarch butterflies then I was ecstatic!

As a girl, I could only fathom

time as rose petals falling down my oesophagus. It tickled and it frightened me. I ran around choking for attention.

I had projections of myself at 100 my neck weathered and adorned like the boards of a home being eaten by the earth.

When I was a girl I would lie

on the side of that road in the last lick of sun and wait for the rabbits to come saluting the sky of orange dust

and then I would shoot them into outer space.

For many years I watched them bouncing on the moon. But then I stopped caring and so I stopped looking.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Rangikura by Tayi Tibble.

Browse other books by Tayi Tibble and follow her on Instagram @paniaofthekeef.

Hear Tayi Tibble and Harryette Mullen read from their new poetry collections at Beyond Baroque in Los Angeles, CA on April 10 at 8:00 PM. Tayi Tibble will be joined by Sasha LaPointe in Washington for a series of readings and conversations at Elliot Bay Book Company in Seattle on April 13 at 7:00 PM, at King's Books in Tacoma on April 14 at 1:00 PM, at Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in Bainbridge on April 15 at 7:00 PM, and at Third Place Books in Seattle, Lake Forest Park, on April 16 at 7:00 PM. Tayi and Sasha will also be at Broadway Books in Portland, OR, on April 17 at 6:00 PM. Tayi will be at the LA Times Book Festival signing books at the ALTA booth (Booth 111) on April 20 at 11:00 AM.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

#TibbleAudio #poetry #knopf #poem-a-day #knopf poetry #national poetry month #poetry month #knopfpoetry #poem #tayi tibble #rangikura #homirmiro

[beareadsbookz]

AAPI Heritage Month Hopefuls

(books I want to read if I can get them)

Rise of the Manō by Leialoha Humpherys

Poūkahangatus by Tayi Tibble

Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo

Hula by Jasmin ‘Iolani Hakes

Vā: Stories of the Women of the Moana edited by Sisilia Eteuati and Lani Wendt Young

The Wild Ones by Nafiza Azad

Song of Silver, Flame Like Night by Amélie Wen Zhao

The Last Bloodcarver by Vanessa Le

The Do’s and Donuts of Love by Adiba Jaigirdar

Zachary Ying and the Dragon Emperor by Xiran Jay Zhao

Weird Fishes by Rae Mariz

The Marvelous Mirza Girls by Sheba Karim

One Boy, No Water by Lehua Parker

The Bone People by Keri Hulme

The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh

The Wonders We Seek by Saadia Faruqi & Aneesa Mumtaz

Dragonfruit by Makiia Lucier

The Dragon Prince: Stories and Legends From Vietnam edited by Thich Nhat Hanh

The Emperor and the Endless Palace by Justinian Huang

Muslim Girls Rise by Saira Amir

Fish Swimming In Dappled Sunlight by Alison Watts & Riku Onda

Red, White, and Whole by Rajani LaRocco

Banyan Moon by Thao Thai

Force Of Fire by Sayantani DasGupta

Rangikura by Tayi Tibble

Writing In Color by multiple authors (including but not limited to Nafiza Azad, Axie Oh, Joan He, Chloe Gong, and Darcie Little Badger)

I will be reblogging with reviews as I finish these!

#aapi books #aapi heritage month #aapi month #tbr pile #tbr list #bookblr #diverse booklr #diverse books

[lohstandfound]

Aotearoa [Mostly Poetry] Books I Am In Love With

Some I've included a little review, some I haven't. I still love them. I will probably add to this as I read more

Thorn Boy by C T Dickons

Thorn Boy is a fantasy short story anthology featuring arch demons in hell, the house at the end of the dock, a boy who blends in like a lizard, guardian of the stars, and more. It's a wonderful and imaginative collection refined over years. (Also the cover is gorgeous)

Crude Common Denominator by Max and Olive

Hera Lindsay Bird and Sincerity/Irony by Hera Lindsay Bird

Echidna by essa may ranapiri

A mashup of mythologies: Greek, Māori, and Christianity. It is wonderful and experimental and incredibly queer. This poetry collections follows titular character Echidna as they grow up, punctuated by Maui and Prometheus' tragic love story. It pays homage and is in conversation with many other poets from Aotearoa

Super Model Minority by Chris Tse

The Surgeon's Brain by Oscar Upperton

Poūkahangatus and Rangikura by Tayi Tibble

Meat Lovers by Rebecca Hawkes

From growing up rural to moving to a big city, another lens of the queer experience, Meat Lovers was another favourite. I love a poetry collection that also tells a story.

Biter by Claudia Jardine

The modern and the classics are woven effortlessly together in Jardine's collection with scatterings of Greek epigram translations. As a lover of the classics and a lover of poetry, this is perfect

Black Marks on the White Page edited by Witi Ihimaera and Tina Makereti

A stunning collection of Oceanic writing. Have I read all of it? Not yet, but there are some wonderful pieces in here and this was one of my first true introductions to Oceanic writing. 'Pitter Patter Papatūānuku' remains my favourite.

Transposium by Dani Yourukova

The reason I made this post. A mashup of poetry and dark academia and philosophy and classics. Queer longing, philosophy rambles, thinly veiled Les Mis fanfiction.

Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa edited by Emma Barnes and Chris Tse

Exactly what the title says. This is the first of it's kind in Aotearoa and it is an incredibly beautiful anthology.

Scathing: A Horror Anthology by Sam Wyss

Fucking creepy. I wanted to throw my book across the room because it made my skin crawl (and I would have had I not been at work). But wonderful. 24 short horror stories set in the fictional town of Scathing. From moon mania to murder to spontaneous human combustion, to weird deer creatures. Sam is a bloody talented author and I am 100% biased in saying that.

Ship of Horrors: A Manifest of Nightmares

Just like Scathing, it was bone chilling. Made my skin scrawl. I wanted to through my book across the room. This is a collection of a variety of local authors who all had the same prompt: The UCF Carcosa has been found adrift in space, the ship's only communication is a single repeating plea, 'leave us be. For god's sake, run away'. Killer plagues, graphic depictions of spaghettification, evil plants, eldritch monsters. And I am also 100% biased in saying this one as well. (If you've seen my posts about Spores)

#lohst.txt #poetry #book recs #this is probably something better suited for main but oh well

[pwpoetry]

Q&A with Tayi Tibble

M: Can you tell us a bit about the title of your collection?

T: Poukahangatus is a transliteration of Pocahontas, articulated in Te Reo Maori phonetics. It doesn’t have an actual or complete meaning in Maori, but broken down, ‘pou’ means a pillar, a column, a totem, and ‘kaha’ means strength or bravery, and I like those meanings being present in the title for the collection.

The title is also lifted from the opening essay, ‘Poukahangatus: An Essay about Indigenous Hair Do’s and Don’ts’ and just as the essay explores, I think as a title, Poukahangatus suggests themes of indigenous representation, appropriation, story sovereignty and reclamation, which are recurring and the undercurrent of the collection.

M: This was your debut--what was it like shaping it, and what have you worked on since?

T: I wrote Poukahangatus while I was studying towards my MFA at the International Institute of Modern Letters, so it was shaped through workshops, supervision and a year of concentrated study which was all super helpful to both the book's development, and my own development as a writer. It was an intense but very rewarding experience — it was the first time I had ever explored my culture, my family, the history and impact of colonization in my writing and in New Zealand at the time, there was a bit of a gap in our literature that held both Te Ao Maori (the maori world) and the modern, globalized world of pop culture and the internet, so writing into that space was very fertile, but in part, sort of vulnerable too.

Since then, I wrote a second collection Rangikura, which will also be published by Knopf at a later date. It’s similar to Poukahangatus with its themes of family and colonization, but its parameters are a little tighter, and the intensity turned up — it has an undercurrent of climate change urgency; exploring the relationship between the desecration of the earth and desecration of indigenous women. I’m currently also starting a third collection, but it’s taking its time to reveal itself.

M: There's a range of forms in your first collection. Can you talk a bit about the prose poems that anchor the opening and appear throughout?

T: I’m interested in prose poems because I am interested in storytelling. I write poetry of course, but I also consider my poems to be, and want my poems to serve as, a form of indigenous storytelling; a way to capture and articulate our indigenous knowledge and experiences, and pass them along through generations.

I guess I like how prose poems invite density, generosity, and exploration while also offering the visual cue or expectation that there might be a narrative drive or a story. Many of the prose poems in Poukahangatus have a narrative drive or tell stories. For example, ‘Tangi in The King Country’ is a series of prose poems that tell the story of two small children returning to their marae or ancestral lands for the first time. In another poem titled ‘Pania’ a relationship between an exotic dancer and her client is told over three blocks of prose, which also draws on the traditional myth of Pania of The Reef, a sea maiden from the Ngati Kahungungu tribe of Aotearoa. It’s important to me as a writer to share the stories of my people, and prose poems are a functional way to do this. I like playing with dense blocks of text, but still working the language enough to make it feel light and sing like poetry.

M: Are there any other books or works of art with which you feel your work is in conversation?

T: I’m not sure if they're in conversation with, but the books that spoke to me as I was writing Poukahangatus, and in turn helped me to find my voice and speak with courage and confidence were Citizen by Claudia Rankine, Teaching my Mother How to Give Birth by Warsan Shire and Fale Aitu by Tusiata Avia. They sort of formed the atmosphere I wanted to write into, these passionate wahine writing about power and ancestry with truth and reclamation

#poetry #Q&A #tayi tibble #maya c. popa

[flameintobeing]

People have been fascinated by the woman with the flowers who appears for about a second (2:23-4) in the “solar power” video: I’ve seen speculation that she’s farther from the main location of the video (because there don’t seem to be any flowers on the beach) and therefore might be hinting at what the next video could be like...

Well, thanks to this great article about who’s who in the video, I know this is Wellington-based poet Tayi Tibble. I also know that she’s just published her second book of poems, Rangikura, a day before “Solar Power” dropped. This is the book’s description:

These poems live in the space between the end of the world and a new day. They ask us to think about our relationship to desire and exploitation. They are both nostalgic for, and exhausted by, the pursuit of an endless summer.

And this feels so poignant and appropriate that I can’t help but think, maybe her poems will be on the album in some way?

#Tayi Tibble #solar power #lorde #poetry #music #new zealand #me analyzing stuff

[healthyactivekids]

We used the hydration kit as part of our inquiry unit - Tinana - Our body. It fitted so perfectly - Nutrition and explaining how processes work. We ran both experiments and looked at how the changes could be replicated in our bodies. The kids really enjoyed both experiments (They even ate the gummy bears after) yuck!!

Jen, Rangikura School 

#designing