Alice Te Punga Somerville



Behind Every Job Ad in Indigenous Studies

there are countless meetings at which mouths were fired like guns in the old familiar campaigns from which overstretched Native faculty limped home to be nursed by loved ones or by Netflix or by messenger threads or by many (too …

Posted in 109: NO THEME 12 | Tagged

What Blooms Beneath a Blood-Red Sky: A Year in Aotearoa Poetry

Poetry is booming in Aotearoa, and nobody can quite say why. What’s stirring our blood in the plague years / this sixth mass extinction / our deteriorating climate of political and literal atmospheres?

Posted in ESSAYS | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Kupu rere kē

My friend was advised to italicise all the foreign words in her poems. This advice came from a well-meaning woman with NZ poetry on her business card and an English accent in her mouth. I have been thinking about this …

Posted in 100: BROWNFACE | Tagged