In this follow-up collection to the award-winning The Truth Garden, Emma Neale asks where exactly do the personal and the political drop hands? In poems that are engaged, compelling, witty and moving, she looks at how we navigate a true line through the psychological, environmental, social and economic anxieties of our times. The book examines love in its many guises, and also energetically responds to the distractions and delights of the digital age. Writing of Emma Neale's 'kitchen-familiar and cosmic-wide attentions', Poet Laureate Vincent O'Sullivan has said, 'There is something so celebratory about Emma Neale's poetry, about its eager, informed, needle-eyed engagement with the contemporary world [She runs] the hot thread of linguistic flare and precision through whatever occasion she takes up.'
Emma Neale has published six novels and five poetry collections, and edited several anthologies. She is a former Robert Burns fellow (2012) and has received numerous awards and grants for her writing including the Janet Frame/NZSA Memorial Prize for Literature (2008), the University of Otago/Sir James Wallace Pah Residency (2014), and she was Philip and Diane Beatson/NZSA Writing Fellow in 2015. Neale was awarded the Kathleen Grattan Award for 2011 for her poetry collection The Truth Garden, and was a finalist for the Acorn Foundation Fiction Prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards 2017 for her novel Billy Bird. Since 2018 she has been editor of Landfall journal, and she holds a PhD in New Zealand Literature from University College London (UK).