Author(s): Hana Pera Aoake (Ngaati Mahuta, Tainui/Waikato, Ngaati Hinerangi)

Poetry | Essay | Aotearoa | Compound Press

This authoritative debut volume collects a number of the author’s provocative texts from online sources, and reformats them for a new printed experience, brought to life by special use of the mid-20th Century typefaces designed by Samoan New Zealander Joseph Churchward. 

Hana Pera Aoake (Ngaati Mahuta, Tainui/Waikato, Ngaati Hinerangi) is an artist and writer based in Waikouaiti on stolen Kai Tahu, Kati Mamoe and Waitaha lands. They are keen to restart the land wars and love eating kaimoana and defacing colonial property.

 Hybrid in form and theme, what cyborg melts hierarchies, what cyborg turns the gender binary to dust, what cyborg fights for our mana motuhake? This one! Read this book and then do something about it.

—essa may ranapiri

Writing with radical tenderness, with beauty and pain and precision, Hana Pera Aoake envisions an anticapitalist, de-colonial, Indigenous way of living and being, transcending the borders of poetry and prose in a style similar to that of Claudia Rankine and Layli Long Soldier. A bath full of kawakawa and hot water is an essential poetic text in the literature of Aotearoa, and a call to action at the end of the world.

—Nina Mingya Powles

Part memoir, part myth, part rant, part dream, part chant… This is an exciting and poignant book from one of my favourite NZ writers.

—Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle