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...while all the information displayed here is accurate, it it not exhaustive <3
Punch a Hole in the Sky to Let in the Light
by Jennifer Love
Short story, Riot Grrrl!, Surreal, 2SLGBTQIA+, Queer, Feminist, Coming of Age
978-0-473-68662-8
PUNCH A HOLE IN THE SKY TO LET IN THE LIGHT illuminates incidents bizarre and disconcerting: creatures changing material and omens materializing out of thin air; women confronting death and feeling cornered into acts of violence. The characters populating these confessionals and fever dreams are at odds with the surrounding world. Their struggles and choices hold a funhouse mirror up to the socialization we’re subject to straight out of the womb, and the expectations we then hold each other to for the rest of our strange, sad days. Cauterize those knuckles and grab your shades, baby – the light is searing.
Jennifer Love is a writer and clown school reject from the Bay Area. Her short fiction and poetry have appeared in X-RAY, Minola Review, Storm Cellar, Autre, and elsewhere. Her first novel Please Fear Me is forthcoming autumn 2024 from Fairlight Books
Butter on Toast The Next Morning
by Renae Williams
Publisher 5ever books
Author Renae Williams
Format Paperback
RRP NZD 20.00
ISBN 978-0-473-67007-8
Size (w * h) A5 – 14.85 cm x 21 cm
Pages 75
Category Poetry
Publication Date March 8th 2023
"I love this book. It's filled with beautiful simple poems that grab a slice of life and hold it up to the sun."
- Dominic Hoey
Back cover Blurb
Success is scrubbing black mould off walls and still having energy to spread butter on your toast the next morning. Small victories. Relief is not waking up to alarms because you put down the 9-5 and sent a postcard to capitalism reading—“I need me”.
Synopsis
Butter on Toast the Next Morning is a looking glass into the human condition and the slightly vulgar (but incredibly normal) phenomena that comes with it. Poem by poem, this debut by Aotearoa poet Renae Williams is a mute on tradition. A halt on the hustle. A reminder to love a little harder, let the light in a little more, and to not be afraid of the shadows.
About the Author
Renae Williams is an Aotearoa writer and performer with roots stretching from Taranaki, through to Horowhenua and Wellington. Renae started writing way back when and began sharing her poetry and prose online in her earlier 20s. She now performs her poetry, won Spirit of the Slam award at the 2021 Wellington Slam Poetry Regional Finals, and has a few poems hanging from the walls at cafes. A lot of the time you can find Renae guzzling coffee, annoying the cat, turning the shower to cold, and feeling all four seasons in one day.
Heavy is the Head
(Abridged)
Nani Mahal
Published Dec 2020
ISBN 978-0-473-54096-8
RRP $15
Heavy is the Head is a comic grimoire that archives human experience and emotions. The selection within this Abridged publication is part of a vast collection of over 3000 pages of draft authored by Nani within a few short years, using praxis as a therapeutic act to deal with PTSD and depression. Creating these works helped Nani find acceptance and accountability with hard feelings and hard personal truths. Common themes include coming to terms with love, loss, acceptance and agency. The illustrations are complemented by simple symbolism, and the minimalist, raw and open art gives a sense of safe space for vulnerability within the pages.
Crude Common Denominator Pleb Trash Baseline Urge Ass Poetry: Confessions from the Sick Bay (Abridged)
Max & Olive
Published Dec 2020
ISBN 978-0-473-54098-2
RRP $15
Crude Common Denominator Pleb Trash Baseline Urge Ass Poetry: Confessions from the Sick Bay is a collection of experimental poetic attempts and gestures: towards something big, deep, fundamental, sick. It paddles through art, pop culture, humour, lyric, psychology and the absurd on its long swim towards death.
Theatre of Ocean: Stories of Performance between Us (Abridged)
Alexa Wilson
Published Dec 2020
ISBN 978-0-473-54094-4
RRP $15
Theatre of Ocean: Stories of Performance Between Us is a memoir of outtakes from a performance artist moving backwards and forwards in space and time in a world recently past. Alexa Wilson offers us the interwoven remains of performance, love, art, culture, gender and politics. Juxtaposing real stories with art works and musings performed, scripted, staged, or improvised, Theatre of Ocean reveals an artist clawing at the possibilities for social-political change in a dynamic triumvirate of settings: New York, Berlin, New Zealand. An established international performance, dance and video artist from New Zealand based in Berlin at the time of writing, Alexa Wilson leads the reader through a world of global performance traversing cultures and times during the peak and crisis of a consumer age.
Pragmatic Speculativity, less the thickness of feeling (Abridged)
Sasha da Sylva
Published Dec 2020
ISBN 978-0-473-54097-5
RRP $15
Pragmatic Speculativity, less the thickness of feeling returns to the discussion of speculativity that began in it was both, and. (2019).
The excerpts within this Abridged selection were written in 2018, 2019 and during the nation-wide level 4 lockdown in 2020. As meditations on the experience of being alive - corporeal, leaking and blustering from the page - these collected writings hold the fragmented remains of a reckoning with what is, what might be and the ways in which these ideas mis-match to the actual world.
Aotearoa Rising
(Abridged)
Collage Club
Published Dec 2020
ISBN 978-0-473-54095-1
RRP $15
In 2019, from Friday the 26th to Sunday the 28th of July, Sarah Lee and Sasha Francis co-hosted a collage stall at Festival for the Future 2019 in which participants were invited to contribute to an emerging exquisite corpse, now titled Aotearoa Rising.
This Abridged selection is the contents of five notebooks the public was invited to collage into. Each notebook held an initial prompt, now corresponding to the discrete sections: “The Aotearoa I know: longing, belonging”; “letting go: mourning”; “feeling together: falling together”; and “the space between.” In respect for the ordering and arrangement of the original material, blank pages were left intentionally.
Nagology: an exercise in mattering
ISBN 978-0-473-62074-5
Pages 230
Category Performance Art, Book Making, Poetry, Fiction, Experimental
Publication Date 23rd March 2022
5ever books were invited by NAG (Marcus McShane) to do a 7-hour micro-residency during The Performance Arcade 2021.
The residency became a collaborative pop-up book factory: as long as the public circled in, energy inevitably transformed matter towards a book object state. Contributions took many forms: hand drawings, on-site typewritten notes, short stories, graphic art, poetry and other works from a total of 40 contributors.
This final book object holds all the contributions from that event. Includes: new poem ‘Tiny’ by Ockham award winning poet Helen Rickerby; visual contributions from literary poet and punk Kerry Ann Lee; contributions from 5ever authors Alexa Wilson and Nani Mahal; numerous contributions from local artists and writers, including but not limited to: Nicole Gaston, Marika Pratley, Adam Ben-Dror, Cricket, Linda Lee, Tallulah Farrar, Anne-Lisa Noordover, Kate Isabella, Ollie Hutton.
Theatre of Ocean:
Stories of Performance
Between Us
Publisher 5ever books
Author/s Alexa Wilson
Format Paperback
RRP NZD40.00 - USD40.00
ISBN 978-0-473-66136-6
Size (w * h) A5 – 14.85 cm x 21 cm
Pages 498
Category Non Fiction
Publication Date 24th November 2022
Synopsis
Theatre of Ocean is a memoir of outtakes from international performance and video artist, New Zealand choreographer Alexa Wilson. She guides the reader through fragmented musings that traverse the spaces between cultures and identities at a digitally, politically and environmentally escalating time in the early 21st Century.
The writing in Theatre of Ocean ranges from hyper-emotional prose-poem to film script to academic feminist critique to humour piece. Written largely in Berlin, the book expresses a feminism through a theatre of words; juxtaposing real stories with art works and musings performed, scripted, staged, or improvised, Theatre of Ocean reveals an artist clawing at the possibilities for socio-political change in the fabric of our world, in a dynamic triumvirate of settings: New York, Berlin, New Zealand.
Theatre of Ocean uses its central metaphor to connect everyone and everything through a relentless ocean of performances within frameworks of experience, often violent, offering the reader opportunities for engagement. Ultimately, it is the opposite of an autobiography about an individual – it is stories of performance between an individual and her audience as well as those in her world, the collective forces that both affect and are affected by an individual, and what an individual can do to transform these forces.
An Historical Overview of Lambton Harbour
by D J Pyle
Author/s D J Pyle
Format Paperback
RRP $20.00
ISBN 978-0-473-57530-4
Size (w * h) A5 – 14.85 cm x 21 cm
Pages 68
Category History, Non-fiction
Publication Date June 1st 2021
Half zine, half book, half pamphlet, An Historical Overview of Lambton Harbour is a light but rigorous exploration of the history of the Wellington Harbour from pre-colonial times to nowadays. Described by the author as a "fact sheet for the newcomer" D J Pyle's austere writing sternly drives the conversation towards the darker, bloodier sides of our collective history with an exclusive focus on the events that happened on Te Whanganui-a-Tara. Packed with archival images, this book is a modest invitation for historical curiosity and refrains, always, from providing a definitive answer.
Crude Common Denominator Pleb Trash Baseline Urge
Ass Poetry: Confessions from the Sick Bay
Max and Olive
13th October 2022
$20.00
978-0-473-65251-7
NZ Poetry, Experimental, Comedy, Contemporary
Crude Common Denominator Pleb Trash Baseline Urge Ass Poetry: Confessions from the Sick Bay is a collection of experimental poetic attempts and gestures: towards something big, deep, fundamental, sick. It paddles through art, pop culture, humour, lyric, psychology and the absurd on its long swim towards death. Max and Olive have been working on writing and community projects together since 2015, usually in different parts of the world to each other. Their collective creative interests include health, expression, community, futurisms, bad jokes, cooking and talking on the phone.
It Was Both, And
Sasha Francis
RRP $30
