'NZTOTSN' (New Zealand, Top of the South, Nelson) is an exploration of place and of non-belonging to a place. This project imitates Adam Warne’s Suffolk Bang. Where Warne writes about rural Suffolk, where he and his family originate, I wrote about Nelson, New Zealand, where I had attempted to settle as an immigrant. In these short poems, as in Suffolk Bang, both place and lyric subject are found in the interstices between apocryphal fragments.
Three poems were published on The Burning House Press Blog, and can be read here. Four poems from 'NZTOTSN' were also published in Kiss Me Hardy, a Nelson-based arts journal, now defunct. Read them below.
More Artists per Capita
no double glazing
where a conservative
dog tied to a post
is dragged into the 21st century
I’m sick, you know
though very angry
at the library which
imagines a garret existence
getting organised
Serial Offender
My heart to pieces where
the wild oats are sown
brother hand
I’ve tarot with Geraldo
in The Wasteland
before he had his coffee
ours the second time
was breath-taking
at home, all the bone-coloured corn
History
are in the residential
just screaming
people live here
sudden is the driven dust
and the motor vehicles
of a preventable
don’t know the half
O refresh my soul
Craft Beer Depot, immediately
Thankless
sunflowers are bullshit but
his spirit’s illiterate
and would starve to death
another grubby little bitch
in a sensible fleece
no homeless and
much sunshine
is a damp draughtiness
to perish in
Flesh is a furious shore
Yang Lian
translated by Brian Holton and Agnes Hung-Chong Chan