EDUCATIONAL AND SCIENCE WRITING
Writing about writing:
Cordite
Review of...... all the books. What Blooms Beneath a Blood-Red Sky: A Year in Aotearoa Poetry
"For some semblance of brevity, the following reflections focus on book-length works of poetry published in 2022. Still there are necessarily exclusions from this survey. Even I, a hog-wild simp for verse, simply haven’t yet been able to read every book printed in the calendar year. Nor could I offer every book the attention it deserves, wanton with the wordcount though I’ve been! It is a luxury problem to see so much worthy work published that the gothic castle of poetry with its ever-expanding rooms could take more than any one lifetime to explore. That said, let me now take my candelabra in hand to guide you through some choice chambers. My burning torch alone can’t illuminate every aspect of the year’s poetic offerings, but hopefully this brief tour encourages you to travel deeper into Aotearoa letters yourself."
Te Herenga Waka University Press
Waxing lyrick re: Nick Ascroft's The Stupefying: DISMANTLING THE CROQUEMBOUCHE: LAUNCHING THE STUPEFYING BY NICK ASCROFT
"It’s anyone’s guess as to why Nick, so suspicious of poetical excess, has engaged me – fruitiest and most diaphanous of maximalists – to spin sugarwork for his launch. But there we have it. Whatever extra candyfloss I fluff up for the next five minutes, know this: The book is good."
The Spinoff
Raving about Cadence Chung's Anomalia: Give it up for Cadence Chung
"The beating anatomical heart of this book is something at the hot sore core of so many poets’ work: a need to be seen, and known, and understood in all our oddness, even if that means submitting our vulnerabilities for dissection. The specimen begs the scientist: look at me! not at my shell of a body not at my pieces and parts but at my eyes and later in the book the scientist obligingly opens the specimen’s heart like a ripe pomegranate, knowing to the point of obliteration. How can we offer our full selves to others without inviting destruction?
NZ Poetry Shelf
Yarning with Paula Green: Poetry Shelf conversation: Rebecca Hawkes
"In painting and poems I’m meditative and open, but also working hard in pursuit of something that mainly eludes me – but maybe I’ll get it next time, and this is what keeps me growing (I hope) as an artist. It also keeps me hungry for others’ work. Yes to everything you said about the energising and uplifting nature of sinking into others’ art! Reading outside of myself is crucial to my writing, and looking carefully at other people’s visual art is essential to my painting. Even though making my own art is a solitary act, if I was in a vacuum without others’ work to delight in and explore, I doubt I’d make much of anything."
Poetry Shelf Friday talk spot: Rebecca Hawkes on the poem as a snowglobe to contain the Anthropocene
"Each poem is also a way to pick up something about what’s happening to our world and ourselves. To write like this is a way to stake out what’s real and important. What vision of the world we should hold on to, what kind of mark we want to leave – from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch to the snow leopard vanishing."
Booksellers NZ
Review of Therese Lloyd: The Facts
"The framing of The Facts around the concepts in Lloyd’s doctoral thesis lends an intellectual experiment that is inevitably more rewarding if you’re interested in meta-analysis and are familiar with Anne Carson’s work. [However] the poems in this collection – compassionate but unflinching – are rewarding even if you don’t want to be assigned extra reading.'
Academic writing:
The Journal of Popular Culture
“The Future of Sex”: Intermedial Desire between Fembot Fantasies and Sexbot Technologies
This paper explores the way dystopian sci-fi film representations of feminine robots are drawn on in news coverage of actual sex robot technology. Films on this subject tend to be thrillers that go badly for a male protagonist who romances the robot, but the pervasive fears and desires portrayed in these fantasies are often treated as evidence that the technological success of - and consumer desire for - fully-fledged fembot technology is 'inevitable'.
Pūratōke: A Journal of Undergraduate Research
A research paper on affective politics of shame and disgust in the Twitter doxing of neo-Nazis and white supremacists after the 2017 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville.
Science communication:
Connected
"...You don’t just hear with your ears! Some sounds, especially very low sounds, are heard through your bones. If your record your voice and then play it back, it will probably sound higher pitched than you expect it to be. This is because you hear a lot of your own voice through the bones in your skull..."
This article describes the process undertaken by three students from Feilding’s Manchester Street School as they designed and built a robot that won the New Zealand VEX IQ Challenge. The article offers an authentic way of introducing students to programming and computational thinking, as well as physics and engineering concepts related to energy, weight, and balance.
Nature writing:
Up Country
The only good possum is a dead possum
"In New Zealand’s alcoholic ingenuity, ‘Possum’ is a drinking game where players scale trees and consume beers (preferably 24-packs of Speights; Pride Of The South) until they fall to the ground from drunkenness. It is unclear whether the first or last to plummet is the real winner..."
