Poems on boyfriends keep a bemused but guarded casualness – ‘I tried to be chill for you,’ even where a dam is about to burst but the rats surfing on it are having too much fun to notice – before the dreadful toll of the standalone line, ‘I knew these would be our last fish and chips’. There are always good new love poems because we are all always navigating how to love properly, when there are as many ways to arrange relationships as there are people to be into – and as she embarks on questions of romance Cho’s writing is too ingeniously wry to read as naïve.
Shifting affections aside, Cho’s mother is the star of this book, artistic and compassionate, anchoring her daughter in Korea and Aotearoa despite all the choices she herself has been denied. Through lyric and essay, Cho goes deeply into what it’s like to be a daughter growing up to realise her mother’s thwarted potential, and the guilt of youth in needing distance from the person you used to depend on – who in fact is now the one who needs you. ‘When I visit I’m usually only in town for the weekend and I’m hungover for half of it, and she puts on lipstick and smiles wide, wanting to be her best for me, her gold back teeth sparkling’.
The poem-in-vignettes Our Skin Rubs Off is an astonishment of intimacy, body horror and the consuming questions of maternity. It traverses a classic train of thought for writers of a certain age under these reddening skies:
I’m the friend who wants a baby. But If I have a baby, will the baby watch me be belittled? If I have a baby, will I depend on the baby? I don’t want to depend on the baby, but I want a baby. If I have a baby, I will have to be sober for at least two years. Will I be able to say yes to the baby, yes you can sign up to the netball team, yes you can afford it? If I have a baby and the world is even more cooked, will I be able to say twenty years is better than none?
The same poem closes deliciously, horribly, on an image as a youngest daughter rubs her mother’s back in the bath with an exfoliating mitt, and …
The water begins to shift with a rain of dead skin. The flakes float into water. They turn into tadpoles. The mother feels lighter and lighter. Suddenly, she realises she is being erased. They are multiplying. They are hungry. They assess the situation. There is only one solution.
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The solution to pretty much everything, according to Jordan Hamel, is to make like a viral video and fill your problem areas with dried instant noodles instead of gap filler.
Published by Dead Bird Books, Jordan Hamel’s Everyone Is Everyone Except You is a torrent of pop-culture anxiety, a low self-esteem sitcom, a reassurance that you’re not alone upended into confirmation that the only true state of the self is isolation – your body melting into the loam in a National Park. New Zealand’s 2018 national poetry slam champion takes bravado and gags from stage to page in this softboi manifesto, quipping: ‘poetry is the infinity pool of vanity / and baby I have brought my wetsuit’.
Reading Everyone Is Everyone Except You is a bit like dropping acid, tracking down the first boy you kissed over a pile of knockoff Yu-Gi-Oh cards at primary school, hacking his Facebook and watching his recommended reels with a growing fascination and horror. Mixing a cocktail of toxic masculinity, Double Browns, and endless data weekend deals, Hamel is a master of modern depresso-comedy and one of our most inventive writers. The poems rollick at breakneck pace through fantasies of the Briscoes lady planning his funeral, and middle-aged accountant mermen who don’t swim when you toss water on them – just invoice for their time.
Hamel takes lapsed Catholicism screamo with a Nu-Metal track howling from the church organ, asking the Lord to ‘Deliver us from temptation / like a reverse Uber Eats’. Nothing is sacred in this collection, and it’s all the more entertaining for it.
If you read this backwards blood becomes wine
When I’m ready to bear fruit
it will be less…… transubstantiation
more… Initial Public Offering
Can you really afford not to? I’m bullish
on all things confession and rule two is
never short the economy of sadness.
Although ‘reject sincerity’ is cited as a mantra, a relentlessly self-deprecating comedy schtick gives way to moments of profound vulnerability – where a good kiwi lad holding a grieving friend intimately as a lover must promise not to tell the boys, or a poem titled ‘We are the happiest couple at the party’ moves from gross closeness to a sense of the void beneath the pair:
Flesh jammed tight against shared coffin boards like two hams in a vegetable drawer […] We have so many single friends they sprout and bloom with carnal endurance we collect them like trading cards we hold their escapades close we play on their Tinder for fun. We find another single friend recently divorced, nothing happened they just sort of drifted apart. We sigh and drink and laugh. We kiss each other nervously.
As Hamel says, ‘even a broken man is right twice a day / and there isn’t a masculinity crisis I can fix’. If this is what he can do with brokenness, the hilarious and unexpectedly harrowing work of Hamel is set to remain notorious.
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Under its original moniker We Are Babies, the freshly rebranded Tender Press published its first five volumes between the Novembers of 2021 and 2022, four of which were first books (with honourable mention to Rachel O’Neill’s second book with its quizzical dream-logic absurdities, Requiem for a Fruit). Their first title, Whai by Nicole Titihuia Hawkins, won the Jessie MacKay Prize for best first book of poetry at the Ockham Book Awards 2022, placing Tender Press (née WAB) firmly on the literary map. Three new books in 2022 all represent distinctive first collections of questing girlhood by some of the most widely-published young writers taking flight from the launchpad of Starling mag: Cadence Chung, Khadro Mohamed, and Tate Fountain.
