Born Sacred
£13.46
If We Knew How to We Would
£12.49
I am an unmade bed. I am a single thing made up of many other things. I am a reason, a raising, a roof to be raised. I am a song you sing in your sleep. I am a collection of dots. I am a need you buried in the back garden. I am a literal spray of light across a wooden floor in a house where the sun has only just returned. I am a musical phrase. I am a lead light. I am a host. I am seven different names. I am all the fat in my body. I am the sky when it is early spring and I can’t believe I exist in this colour range. I am so blue.
If We Knew How to We Would answers a question nobody asked: How many thoughts can you work into a single poem?
Through breakups and a pandemic, health issues and deaths, Emma Barnes’s second collection is a riveting, overflowing and grief-stricken reckoning with the ordinary: a skinful of spit; insides scooped out with a melon baller; cracked like an egg and nothing inside. ‘It is too much to say nothing about. It is nothing to say too much about.’
Emma Barnes (Pākehā, they/them) studied at the University of Canterbury and lives in Aro Valley, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington. Their poetry has been published in journals including Landfall, Turbine | Kapohau, Cordite and Best New Zealand Poems (2008, 2010, 2021). They performed in Show Ponies in 2022 and 2023. They are the author of the poetry collection I Am in Bed with You (AUP, 2021) and co-editor with Chris Tse of Out Here: An Anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ Writers from Aotearoa (AUP, 2021). They work in tech and spend a lot of time picking up heavy things and putting them back down again.
- ISBN-13
- 9781776711888
- Publisher
- Auckland University Press
- Imprint
- Auckland University Press
- Publication date
- 11 September 2025
- Format
- Paperback
- Pages
- 80
- Dimensions
- 238 x 150 mm
- Language
- English
