A poem from Lee Murray’s new collection Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud.
狐 fox
You are running through the streets of a city—Tāmaki Makaurau, or maybe Pōneke—quiet paws scampering over the broken concrete footpaths, where spindly weeds grow from the cracks. You must not be seen. This is important. There are no foxes in Aotearoa; your appearance would cause suspicion, so you shift in and out of the shadows, taking refuge under hedges and behind garden sheds, and steering away from the golden pools that spread beneath the streetlights. You dog the shadowy darkness as you make your way through the city, past weatherboard houses with their broken iron fences, over overgrown front lawns, around the soaring towers of glass and concrete, and beneath the frowning underpasses, where car headlights slice and slant the darkness, and horns honk.
You come to the waterfront esplanade, where the ocean laps at the jetties with its salty kitten-tongue, and you linger a moment, savouring the smell of fish and feathers. Your stomach growls. These lives have left you ravenous. You chase off the gulls circling an overturned rubbish bin and lick the fish taint from the pages of a greasy newspaper.
Still hungry, you continue on.
litter flutters / where the wind pleases
You find the pile of skulls in a rotting inner-city alleyway. Should you choose one? You are a long way from the glade beside the glass lake. Voices reach you from the main street, where people disperse from a late-night theatre show. Quickly, you pick up the nearest cranium, and perch it on your head.
Whose skull is this?
Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud (Cuba Press), winner of the NZSA Laura Solomon Cuba Press Prize 2023, is in stores now.
The Friday Poem is edited by Chris Tse. Submissions are now being accepted until 21 April 2024. Please send up to three poems in a PDF or Word document to chris@christse.co.nz.
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.
AUCKLAND
1 The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin (Canongate, $55)
Unstoppable!
2 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Fourth Estate, $35)
From a pithy and insightful Kirkus Review: “Eating gets sexy in this offbeat confidence tale.”
3 Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan (Faber & Faber, $25)
Nobody writes quite like Claire Keegan who is one of the most precise and talented short story artists working today.
4 Unsettled: Small Stories of Colonisation by Richard Shaw (Massey University, $40)
A generous and helpful exploration of settler colonial mythology. Read an excerpt on The Spinoff, here.
5 Tomorrow, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin (Vintage, $26)
One of the most successful novels of the decade.
6 The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton, $37)
Another unstoppable novel: here’s a snippet from an in-depth Guardian review: “Like Skippy Dies [another of Murray’s novels], The Bee Sting draws on Irish folklore about a traveller taken in by fairy folk to their great hall of riches under the hill, only to wake many years later in a cold, unfamiliar world where everything they knew and loved has passed away. He uses it as a figure for the unsustainable mania of the Celtic tiger, for the piercing nostalgia surrounding lost youth, for the vanishing of illusions and shared fairytales that allowed this particular family to function. Toward the book’s end, Imelda thinks back to the horrors of her chaotic childhood, the past she can never escape, all that has brought her, second by irrevocable second, to this present moment. “You would give anything to go back to it anything.” You won’t read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year.”
7 What You Are Looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama (Doubleday, $37)
Extremely wholesome story of a librarian who has the cure for precisely what ails you.
8 Amma by Saraid De Silva (Moa Press, $38)
The magnificent debut novel from actor, podcaster and script writer Saraid De Silva has gone off with a bang. Read Brannavan Gnanalingam’s review on The Spinoff, here.
9 The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (Head of Zeus, $25)
The first novel in a trilogy (published in 2016) that sparked the Netflix show produced by the Game of Thrones people.
10 Bird Child and Other Stories by Patricia Grace (Penguin, $37)
The beautiful new collection of stories from the one and only Patricia Grace, reviewed with stunning attention by Rangimarie Sophie Jolley, right here.
‘Media is under threat. Help save The Spinoff with an ongoing commitment to support our work.’
Duncan Greive — Founder
WELLINGTON
(Note that this week’s chart is from the dates 4 – 8 April only due to business as usual being disrupted by new carpets and a pop-up – see photo below)
1 Amma by Saraid De Silva (Moa Press, $38)
2 Unsettled: Small Stories of Colonisation by Richard Shaw (Massey University, $40)
3 When i open the shop by romesh dissanayake (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $35)
Another stunning debut novel from Aotearoa. Here’s the publisher’s blurb: “In his small noodle shop in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, a young chef obsessively juliennes carrots. Nothing is going according to plan: the bills are piling up, his mother is dead, and there are strangers in his kitchen. The ancestors are watching closely.
Told through a series of brilliant interludes and jump cuts, When I open the shop is sometimes blackly funny, sometimes angry and sometimes lyrical, and sometimes – as a car soars off the road on a horror road trip to the Wairarapa – it takes flight into surrealism. A glimpse into immigrant life in Aotearoa, this is a highly entertaining, surprising and poignant debut novel about grief, struggle and community.”
4 Easy Wins by Anna Jones (4th Estate, $60)
It’s been quite the long while since we’ve seen a cook book on this hallowed list. The principle of this one is to take 12 ingredients guaranteed to make your meals yum, and teach you how to use them over 125 recipes. Easy wins indeed!
5 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Fourth Estate, $35)
The Unity Books Wellington pop-up at 69 Willis Street (running for not too much longer now).
6 Unruly: A History of England’s Kings & Queens by David Mitchell (Michael Joseph, $42)
“Unruly is part Horrible Histories, part jolly romp guided by Alan Bennett’s view that history has no sense but is “just one fucking thing after another”. But it is mostly – this being a history of England – swearing.” (from The Guardian)
7 Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Oneworld, $37)
The Booker Prize winner who is coming to Auckland Writers Festival to talk about this book and also why Irish writing is having such a moment.
8 Strong Female Character by Fern Brady (Brazen, $28)
A moving memoir by acclaimed Scottish comedian.
9 The Financial Colonisation of Aotearoa by Catherine Comyn (Economic & Social Research Aotearoa, $30)
“Comyn makes the argument that far from the mere technical management of money, finance and financial institutions were a key, if not dominant, player in the colonisation of this country – an argument that complicates prevalent narratives of colonisation that revolve around the British Crown and adventurous individual explorers.” Read more about the project of this incredible book right here on The Spinoff.
10 The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin (Canongate, $55)
