'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.
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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.
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More Artists per Capita
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Yang Lian
translated by Brian Holton and Agnes Hung-Chong Chan