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'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

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