Cadence Chung



Review short: Cadence Chung’s Mad Diva

My mother once said, “You have too many desires. If you had fewer desires, you’d be happier.” I wish that I then had Cadence Chung’s retort: “easy to blame desire easy to blame it on the want the wanton of a woman” (15). Breathlessly dispensing with punctuation, these words appear in a poem titled ‘Desio’, early in Chung’s sophomore collection, Mad Diva.

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Black Opium

Coleridge wrote his best poems in a poppyseed haze. I’m not sure about those tiles, he said from my bathtub, looking up at the ceiling. I had no idea what he was thinking: my only experience with opium was the …

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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?

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