Our next stop is Aotearoa, with Rebecca Hawkes and Ash Davida Jane. Hawkes is a visual artist and poet whose work revels in the viscerality of the natural world, from houseplants and cultivars to the muck and the soil of the true wilderness; she is a queer poet with an eye for the absurd. Jane is a poet and publisher from Pōneke, whose second collection, How to Live with Mammals, asks pointed and poignant questions about our relationships with the wild creatures with whom we share a home, and our collective, precarious future together.

Rebecca Hawkes’ debut collection, Meat Lovers, is due from AUP in 2022. Ash Davida Jane’s second collection, How to Live With Mammals, was published in 2021 by Te Herenga Waka University Press, and won second place in the 2021 Laurel Prize.