Elese Dowden

In her Cordite essay “What Blooms Beneath a Blood-Red Sky: A Year in Aotearoa Poetry”, Rebecca Hawkes, author of Meat Lovers writes: “Poetry is so hot right now, the bright young rhapsodists proclaim (if largely to a devoted audience of each other). Are we just saying, we’re hot now, evidencing the glow-up since high school, the already-anxiety of what it will mean for our newness to fade when we’ve truly emerged and the first-book fetish fades?”